Oh, well

Where Señor Salme goes to the theater

I am currently doing a sort of collaboration with the guys at Bajotierra Teatro, a troupe of artists I am quite fond of. The idea is to produce a series of drawings illustrating the rehearsals of their upcoming play. The procedure is easy: I go to the place where the rehearsals take place, sit wherever I can and try to pass unnoticed (which is easy). While I am there, I take photographs (no flash), do sketches and mainly watch with rapt attention. Then I go home and produce a drawing or two. They will be using that to promote the premiere of the play and to document the whole process of the play. They’re filming a documentary, also.

At first I thought I could take this as a weird sort of life drawing class, but soon I realized I needed a different approach. While I was trying to get a decent pose on paper, I completely lose awareness of the action taking place in the play. So I relaxed and tried to focus on understanding what was going on in front of me, whether something was relevant or not, how would it translate to paper, etc., and sketch only very rough ideas which I could develop later. This worked better.

The play is called Seres queridos (Loved ones) and is about mourning. This is my first illustration for it:

A detail:

… and the original drawing lying on my table:

Black Magic Higgings ink on A3 bristol board. The rest was added digitally.

Below you can see a video of one of Bajotierra’s latest projects, a play which was represented in a private house to smalls groups of assistants. You can get a glimpse of their style in the video even if you don’t know a word of Spanish.