Genoa-Lisboa Sketch Connection

March: Baccalà / Março: Bacalhau

This is one of the thousand ways Portuguese have of cooking cod fish, and happens to be my favorite. Gather the ingredients: cod fish, potato, chickpeas, carrots, egg and a choice of your preferred greens (broccoli). Boil everything and serve soaked in olive oil and vinegar. Garlic optional. Simple, effective and tasty!

All amenities aside, what won us over was the splendid book and magazine collection the apartment featured. All ranging from books on Russian orthodox art, to photojournalism magazines. There was something there for each of us. What captured my eye was a collection of erotic and psychedelic Italian comic books from the 70’s, and especially the character Valentina, penned by Guido Crepax

Carina was lucky to book her time in Lisboa during the Santos, the city festivities. That usually means sketching drunk among heaps of people, ending the night smelling like sweat and grilled sardines – It was a blast of course!

More than a year has passed since these sketches were done. They’re a month apart and are the records of a great year to be a sketcher in Lisboa. In a partnership with the Lisboa, Capital Ibero-americana da Cultura program and the Fundação Arpad Szenes-Vieira da Silva, the Urban Sketchers Portugal was able to bring to the city several sketchers from Portugal, Spain and Latin America for a season of lectures and workshops.

After the trials of a full-day workshop in Portimão, a brief respite is always on the order of the day, for participants and instructors alike. Beer, some relaxed, non-constrained sketching, new acquaintances, new sketching materials, and beer.

For my third class as instructor in the Urban Sketchers 10 Years x 10 Classes programme in Lisboa, we went to Campo de Ourique market, a small and cozy building, in an uptown district, that underwent a deep renovation a few years ago, and is now a posh destination to eat and drink in the city.

It is a complex territory, known for being heavily industrialized, but strangely enough, also for its vineyards and for being a haven for sun-seekers and nature-lovers. There are all kinds of small towns and villages, each with its own quirks and traditions.

Urban Sketchers Portugal general assembly convened on April 1st. The official annual meeting had a moderate crowd, almost like a family gathering, except that it had powerpoints and spreadsheets.

Urban Sketchers Algarve and the Municipality of Portimão invited us to teach a full-day workshop, and we decided to give a a test run to a programme that we had prepared before. It’s called “The narratives of architecture and the people that experience it“

From the Alto da Cotovia, many stories have rolled down the hill – a cleptomaniac arsonist, doomed construction sites, an underground water reservoir that still exists to this date, with an unconspicuous underground path to São Pedro de Alcântara and branching out in all directions of the hill of the Jesuits.