Escuela Superior de Diseño de La Rioja

Matosinhos sketchbooks

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JUN. 18, 2010

Matosinhos sketchbooks

by Javier de Blas

Etiquetas: art drawing erasmus esdir ilustration matosinhos porto report trip sketch sketchbook students

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If everything in Portugal has that personal air, Porto is not precisely an exception. The wellness feeling produced when you walk among such good taste cannot almost fit in the soul.

I think that it was its genuine style that inspired me the little speech with which I opened the workshop “Sketchbook as Graphic Diary” that I taught in ESAD Matosinhos the week from May 17^th to 21^st. I proposed them not to use their Graphic Diaries thinking about the rest, since personal and academic commissions are for that. The Graphic Diary should be used to facilitate perceptions, worries, and the most authentic tastes from each one appear no strings attached.

It was satisfactory to see their smiling approval faces. And to check the initial motivation of the participants, undoubtly promoted in class, and in a more or less direct way, through devoted divulgators such as Eduardo Salavista, sketcher and author of the first, as far as I know, global treaty of work in sketchbooks Diários de Viagem.

As it is always satisfactory see the expectation that new approaches generate new, sometimes not so different, but always said in a different way.

We devoted the first practical session to copy a varied cast of sketchers, chosen above all, in my two favourite webpages: De vuelta con el cuaderno and Urban sketchers.

It is not a contradiction wanting to be personal, and at the same time, copy others. To learn by observing and imitating. Because, if we go further, our own filters turn out to distil the suitable combination of everything that we interiorize.

Porto central market, Bolhao, la Ribera, the train station, Sao Bento and the park Senhora da Hora were used as locations for the great part of the practices.

The motivation that I had seen in the participants was directly related to their preparation. My acknowledgement to their teachers’ work (three of them were so kind to accompany me) and the illusion and capacity of the students. Their good deeds, together with the interest shown through continuous questions about the evolution of their sketches and also the Graphic Diaries that some of them developed through the academic year, made the workshop a place of stimulant participation full of good results.

For the final revision of the works, I selected three by each participant, allowing myself to delete digitally the drawings or parts of them that distracted the contemplation of the best ones. I made the filter without disdaining the daring results, those which in surprise and peculiarity, or the expressive load, were above technical correction. Because it was not about drawing “well” but about communicating beyond the own rational and methodical control, as can be well appreciated in some of the examples here shown.

This operation, well understood by the students, was used to show what in my opinion was the basic aim of the workshop: searching that the drawing tells what cannot be told in any other way.

Sketches