'the matchbox project' is a project i´m doing together with my IB students.

the project has been designed to test the artist´s/student´s resourcefulness, ingenuity, creativity and perception of what art is. it is also meant to open doors to thinking and developing art in new ways and to push the artist/student to use objects he/she might not have considered interesting or encountered in their art work before.

this post will be added to as the work progresses

take a matchbox and empty out the matches disposing of them safely. fill the empty matchbox with as many different items as you can find around the house, out of doors or wherever you are.

arrange the objects inside the matchbox to include as many as possible. Consider how objects that at first seem too big may be manipulated to fit within the box´s dimensions. Can objects be packed inside others? Photograph your open matchbox when it´s full of as many objects as possible.

in your ‘matchbox sketchbook’, use Page 2 (use page 1 to make a list of all the objects in the box) to make a pencil study of a composition of three of the objects in the matchbox

getting ready to start working on the project...

a detail of the cover of the sketchbook i made for this project: matches, gesso, bitumen.

drawing a composition of three objects from the box

the finished drawing, i chose three very disimilar objects on purpose, i wanted something from nature therefore the sea shell, but i also needed some height so i chose the matchbox. this was the first matchbox i used for this project in london and it still has the objects i collected for the project inside. it had a sentimental value too. the injection was my desire to choose a weirder object to make the composition slightly strange. i placed the objects creating a triangle which i very much like.

to be continued...

the other day i caught mom cleaning an old handbag of hers, it had not been touched for over thirty years! she was throwing out a lot of stuff like letters and payment stubs that i decided to keep but had no idea what to do with them until recently. i decided to paint small, intimate objects on them and this is the first one, a coca leaf on a pay stub for my parent's house. like in my watercolour series, i have no idea what i will paint on the next one.

i am very interested in objects that have a memory and this pay stub tells part of my parent´s story, it has my father´s name and the address of their home as well as my grandparent´s one.i love it, i´ve loved keeping it, i´m glad i found mom right at the moment when she was trashing them.

dad´s shaving buddy... (hipstamatic shot) i have kept this object for so many years, it has stayed the way dad left it and again, like his canon camera, to me it is him, it carries his energy. actually i can close my eyes and see dad shaving in the bathroom... i used to love watching him shave.

i like the calm sensation of this photo, this is a very zen looking object to me

i played around with different camera settings and liked this effect

and here´s the whole fun area... i have no idea what object comes now, maybe my baby shoes but i still have to think about it. what i do know is that i´m really enjoying watercolours and have no desire to change material right now. i am going to start a gouache series on found papers though, watercolours woould have not worked for that one.

i submitted the photo below to this http://submit.nytimes.com/sept11-relics?ref=nyregion

that day, the backyard (i was living in brooklyn heights at the time) was covered in burnt pages from books that flew with the explosion. i will forever regret not having picked them all but i was so confused and horrified about what was happening i could not think at that moment.

i´m currently reading (and enjoying) this book by martin gayford. it´s a quick/easy read and i have always felt very attracted to lucian freud. i started the book before he died but it had been left on my bedside table until i saw the news of his death when i grabbed it again. and it grabbed me, i´m finding a resonance with my own practice and beliefs about art making. the paragraph below was of particular interest to me:

"For LF, everything he depicts is a portrait. His peculiarity in the history of art is that he is aware of the individuality of absolutely everything. He has completely un-Platonic sensibility, to put it in philosophical terms. In his work, nothing is generalized, idealized or generic. He insists that the most humble and - to most people - nondescript items have their own characteristics.

Even in the case of a manufactured item, such as a shirt, he finds that one example will be slightly unlike another, a hanging thread perhaps, a different turn of the collar. A year ago, when he was painting a still life of four eggs, he discovered that on close examination each showed distinct personal traits. So the still life turned into a sort of group portrait."

i didn´t plan to paint a whole series but now it makes sense, i'm quite sure these pieces will go in my upcoming exhibition

this is my father´s canon camera; he loved taking photographs, mostly for documenting purposes

he must have looked at me through that lens so many times... when he died i kept it, i even used it myself many years ago... the camera brings memories of dad immediately, it´s him, the object is him.

i did some research on the model and found this "the canon canonet was released in 1961 and is remembered as Canon's first entry into the intermediate-class camera market, and also the first of the highly successful canonet series of 35mm automatic-exposure rangefinder cameras" taken from http://camerapedia.wikia.com/wiki/Canonet i wonder how dad knew about this model, why he bought this specific camera and where are the photos he took with it... maybe he didn´t photograph me with it if it´s such an early camera but then what camera did he use when i was around? this is also reminding me that by the time i was born, dad was tired of having so many kids and did not really take that many pictures of me. i know there´s slides, i´ll see if i can find some. this is what´s happening to me in lima, i´m organically being driven to my past. sometimes i like it but others i´m scared of the findings and the sometimes painful memories...

these photos are from the actual performance of the inauguration of the gran teatro nacional in lima by the soon to leave office president alan garcía perez. it was quite an experience, more on this and more photos soon.

this is a sketch for a new piece i´m working on. i´m only in the research period of it but it´s about my journey back to lima, a continuation of a piece (or a response to it)  that told my story about moving to new york entitled 'new york urbanm ghetto beat' shown below

i decided to test the new pens i bought for this drawing, had not used pen in a while and loved the feeling of them sliding through the paper...

it´s coming out so beautiful...

i feel whatever i draw, it will always look tormented/tortured/scarred... and i'm fine with that!

i need to do these observation drawings all the time; when i don't i loose my rhythm. it also makes me reflect on the beauty of simple things and objects, the poetry of life...