The Israel Sketchbook: January 2009

... aint that dead... judging for all the wild life in it... I know, I was one. The damn greasiest water I ever seen... but honestly, I wouldn´t mind floating all the way to Jordan ( the mountains away) on the other side.

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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.

The Israel Sketchbook

THE DEAD SEA....

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