The Israel Sketchbook: July 2008

The border around Gaza is not the most "israeli sight seeing" of places. Next to a military base ( first drawing) was a watch tower, were I went to draw and, while I was there drawing, a bus full of south american journalists ( I asked them ) came, filmed, photographed and had a picnic in the most relaxed and good humored way...

... apparently oblivious to where they were. You can see the border line below, where a truck and some kind of tank are parked. The landscape ahead is the Gaza Strip. As the silhouettes of its buildings and houses melted with the dusky sky, I could only think how ordinary the place looked.

The sunset gave the place a sad mood. Behind me ( the opposite direction to the drawing above) some touring israeli soldiers came ( not so lightly has the south american jornalists, though) check the place for a while, and went.

I left the place with thoughts of curiosity about daily life of people in Gaza, sadness of why we can´t all get along, and realizing I was starving and dying for a big dinner.

ABOUT THE DRAWINGS

I went the first time to Israel in late August, 2007. I stayed for three weeks in Tel-Aviv, with an Israeli friend I had met before in Lisbon. At that time I had just finished illustrating a comic book that had take almost a year and a half of my life, so you can say that I really needed some time off, somewhere far, far away. Staying with my friend in Tel-Aviv, I was a very surprised with its cosmopolitan life, its young people, the cafes, the shops, the boulevards, the slightly degraded facades of its Bauhaus style buildings, which made them so interesting, so alive, so human...
Apart from all the "war and terrorism" (thank you, mass media), I confess I didn´t knew all that much about Israel. It´s just one of those places you hear all the time in the eight o´clock news, but when you think about how it really is, there´s a kind of blur in your head...
I can´t say that I love those three weeks... Tel-Aviv was so hot and humid. That really got to me. And with my friend working most of the time, in a restaurant, as most of Tel-Aviv young people do, I learned later, I was mostly left to myself and with nothing to do but wonder around, I found myself drawing all the time.
Done in one A5 size sketchbook, and several A6 sketchbooks, these drawings show things I saw, places, people... It was later when I return to Portugal that I started to colored them and realise what I had in my hands... a brand new project. I´ve been to Israel two more times after that, one in November and the last one in April, always with my sketchbooks, these times to see more of the country. I can only hope I have found something is Israel worth sharing... something good.

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