Little Girl's dress (around 1200 b.C) - Moleskine Museum Sketch

A Bride's Dress - around 1930 - Moleksine Museum Sketch

Dress Coat - around 1930 - Moleskine Museum Sketch

Woman's Dress Coat - Moleskine Museum Sketch

A Bride's Dress (around 1950) - Moleskine Museum Sketch

Homage to Hugo Pratt, creator of Corto Maltese - exhibition notebook AHdP

Corto Maltese looks like one of those contemporary male models you can see on tv and in magazines, representing luxury perfumes or designer clothes….but I guess he’s tougher !

He is tall, slim and handsome in his uniform of the merchant marine. He carries his head high, has an impressive lower jaw. He looks relaxed and concentrated at the same time. Sometimes he seems to meditate before the action catches up with him again. He is an adventurer. You meet him in Siberia, in Malaysia, in China, in Africa…

The women around Corto are adventurers too, they love their independance and often fight for a cause. They are beautiful, enigmatic, brave, often hard-edged. They can be mysterious and haughty but they always like Corto Maltese, even if sometimes they work against him.

Corto’s women are Russian Countesses, Singaporean fortune tellers, Malaysian pirates, Irish partisans, African queens and Arab desert princesses…

African Queen - exhibition notebook AHdP

The women often wear colorful and artful headdresses, hats, hairdresses, earrings, hair jewelry.

Artful Hairdresses - exhibition !Homage to Hugo Pratt and Corto Maltese - exhibition notebook AHdP

They look fearless, they lead dangerous lives. They know that life has a cost anyway: death. The titles of the stories they live in evoke all kind of emotions: “SCORPIONS OF THE DESERT”, or “SAMBA WITH FIXED TARGET”. Please note that these are my sketches of Hugo Pratt’s drawings but  

I don’t want to imitate Hugo Pratt….I just would like to honor him with these drawings, and learn from him how he managed to master the black and white excellence…light and shadow simplified….which is a very complicated thing. And I love the movement he creates in all of his images, there’s always a wind blowing, bringing the image to life.

Homage to Hugo Pratt, creator of Corto Maltese - exhibition notebook AHdP

 I spent more than 2 hours in the exhibition, dreaming away with Corto Maltese, admiring the watercolor paintings. Hugo Pratt said: “I would love to be able to make everything understood with one simple line“

Homage to Hugo Pratt and Corto Maltese - exhibition notebook AHdP

In fact, people in the metro, while I drew other people, have said to me several times that my drawings and watercolor sketches remind them those of Hugo Pratt, I had never thought of that before but I sure feel very honoured by those comments and it’s true that I feel very close to his art…

Hugo Pratt was Italian, a cosmopolitan, who travelled a lot and took his inspiration in places all over the world, a globetrotting storytelling cartoonartist:) 

Exhibition “Hugo Pratt’s Imaginary Journey” at the Pinacothèque de Paris http://www.pinacotheque.com/en.html

The Old Year Leaving - Illustration in my moleskine notebook

The old year, rich in events, colors, shapes, surprises, discoveries….it lingers but at the same time it is slowly taking leave…..soon it will disappear behind the hills on the horizon…..

Drawing inspired by Katsina Dolls seen in Museum Quai Branly

It’s interesting to watch how things turn out when you draw something from memory: yesterday’s Katsina-dolls (left) where drawn from memory, in the metro – I tried to reproduce images of what I had seen that day in the museum.

HEREUNDER are the drawings I made standing in front of the REAL dolls, exhibited behind glass in the Musée du Quai Branly. Wow, very different, don’t you think? I didn’t want to color them, as I haven’t taken notes about the REAL colors. I guess I have to go back to the exhibition and do that!

Drawing of puppets inspired by Katsina dolls in Museum Quai Branly

And these are three dolls I drew two or three days after my visit of the exhibition, letting my mind go free, just taking the Katsina dolls as an inspiration. Funny how more European those look:)

Hopi Katsinam - Exhibition Notebook "la fabrique des images" Museum Quai Branly

This drawing on an ARCHE postcard is inspired by Hopi Katsina dolls.

The Katsinam are approx. 20 to 30 cm high, if I remember well,  and they are’nt toys. They were used by the HOPI tribe  to teach children certain rituals and the meaning of them. I drew these during my visit at the Musée Quai Branly at the beginning of the month. They were exhibited in a special exhibition called: THE FACTORY OF IMAGES.

I also found this interesting site about katsina dolls at the Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology, in case you are interested to learn more about the katsina.

I have re-worked this piece here as I thought it was too pink before, and without knowing it, I chose a color which perfectly hamonized with the artwork of the other artists participating in this exhibition!

Now it’s time to relax, have a nice Sunday!

Andrea

Guarding Dragone for my new website

NEWS: NEW WEBSITE IS UP AND RUNNING – ANDREA HUPKE DE PALACIO – painter, illustrator, textile artist – AM BUSY WITH LAST PREPARATIONS FOR TONIGHT’S OPENING OF OUR SHOW – WILL BE BACK WITH NEWS AS SOON AS I CAN – HAVE A GREAT WEDNESDAY – LOVE – ANDREA

SHOW OPENING THIS NIGHT

Excerpt of the Museum’s Introduction to this exhibition:

“Deadline has chosen to examine a group of artists who died during the last twenty years and whose concluding works are marked by an awareness of imminent death, the urgency of the task in hand and an impulse to self-transcendence. Some of the works on show seem not only testamental, but boldly visionary as well, as if ahead of their time. In addition to often being regarded as signs of a death foretold, the works – paintings, photographs, installations, sculptures, videos, – seek to provide an overview of a life with an intensity that sometimes attains to a true plenitude and the fullest possible expression of a truth: like a final word or gesture capable of explaining everything.”

Artists : Absalon, Gilles Aillaud, James Lee Byars, Chen Zhen, Willem de Kooning, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Hans Hartung, Jörg Immendorff, Martin Kippenberger, Robert Mapplethorpe, Joan Mitchell, Hannah Villiger.

What I bring home from this exhibition: No bleak, gloomy thoughts but the feeling of energy. All these works are highly dynamic and full of life, even if they are made in the face of illness and death. They are like a quest for freedom, for liberty, for the sense of life AND death at the same time. ….They make me wonder, maybe death finally isn’t final!

There is no space here to show you pictures of all the works, but I would like to share three of them with you.

Let’s begin with a picture of the  Hans Hartung,a French painter of German origin and one of the most important representatives of ART ABSTRAIT,  and of lyrical abstract art. Hans Hartung is sitting in a weelchair in his studio, painting directly onto the canvas with a device he has invented, a vine-spraying machine.

Exhibition Deadline HHartung1

Painting by Hans Hartung

In the year of his death (1989) Hans Hartung painted more than 300 paintings. I saw the one shown here in the exhibition, it is huge (approx 3 x 4 m / 10 x 13 feet)!

The second painter I would like to show here is Jörg Immendorff, one of the most well-known “art-personalities”  in Germany. His work has been categorized as neo-expressionist, surrealist, symbolist, it was highly political at a moment. He was a member of the German art movement “Neue Wilde” (new wilds). You can find many pictures of his paintings on the internet, via Google Image, and those show mostly very colorful, very crowded pictures.

This too is a very large painting, but it has only few colors and is vaguely reminiscent of Max Ernst paintings, and collages of old copperplate prints. Jörg Immendorff, suffering of an illness which paralyzed him little by little, couldn’t paint anymore when he created this painting with the help of his assistants, who executed the collages according to his instructions.  

Joerg Immendorff

The next artist’s work I have chosen to show here stands in stark contrast to the above work, it’s one of the late works of Willem de Kooning. The exhibition guide text says something like: De Kooning’s declining health has by some critics been used to disregard his late paintings from a certain date onwards before 1989, but some critis also say that de Koonings late paintings capture the essential.

WDEKooning

INSPIRATIONS: The night before I went to see the exhibition, I finished a novel by Paul Auster “Man in the Dark”, a novel about a man reflecting on his past, on life and death. The novel inspired me this little watercolor illustration, which in a way, goes well with todays post… 

Man in the Dark