Three Amigos - click to enlarge

Three Amigos – Pen and ink

My good friends Gustavo Cimadoro (cima-cima doro), Christian Erriquez and Fernando Falcone.
This was done in between classes at the P.Pueyrredon Art School about 10 years ago.
I haven’t seen them ever since but I got in touch with Gustavo a couple of months ago when I started this blog.

Caricatures are my passion. I’ve been making caricatures since I can remember. I made a lot of enemies. Some guys just torn the drawings apart.
I guess everyone is too worried about how they look, so when I show them how I see them they don’t like it.

I studied comics and cartoons when I was a teenager at the EAH (Escuela Argentina de Historietas) back in 1989.
The teachers at the EAH were some of the most famous comic book illustrators and writers.
Most of them were regulars on the “Fierro” magazine and “Humor” magazine.
One of them was Ricardo Barreiro, who one time gave the class a fragment of one of his scripts to illustrate as an assignment.
I also had classes with Miguel Rep and  Sanyu.
Many of the argentinean Comic artists from the 70’s and 80’s had big success and made their careers in Europe, mainly Spain.
Publications like Metal Hurlant (France and Spain), Cimoc (Spain), Zona 84 (Spain), Heavy Metal (USA) and many more had by this time more than 50% of their material from Argentinean hands.

Juan Jimenez, Ricardo Barreiro, Francisco Solano Lopez, Horacio Altuna, Carlos Trillo, José Antonio Muñoz, Carlos Sampayo, Alberto Dose (friend of mine) and many others had a successful career in Europe. It’s important to mention that some of these artists had to escape Argentina from the 1976 to 1983 Argentinean Military Dictartorship  who kidnapped, tortured and killed Hector Oesterheld (and his daughters and an estimated 30,000 people), author of “El Eternauta” one of the best comic books of all times.

5 pm. - click to enlarge

This image is based on a series of photos I took from the bridge that crosses Av. Libertador by the Facultad de Derecho (Law University) in Buenos Aires, Argentina about 12 years ago.
Same technique as usual, photography painted with a digital tablet, this one was printed on canvas.

5 pm. is the rush hour. I was standing still on the bridge, watching how thousands of people were running crazy, desperate to get back home. It felt like something was chasing after them. It’s always like that. If you step away from the collective motion of the rest of the world and become just an observer you slowly start getting that “watching a movie” feeling, like when you step down of the bus or the train. You’ll notice how many people are willing to risk their lives (or others) just to catch a green light or to get home 2 minutes earlier. And I’m no different, no better nor worse. I blend in, and start acting like a wild animal, always trying to get somewhere first. There’s too little to gain but too much to lose. Last year I was in a car accident. I messed up my left arm, nothing serious really. It cost me some pain and about $2,000. My arm is now fine, my car is fixed but my brain remains the same. I haven’t learned anything. Human nature I guess, short memory, or like my father likes to call it, “selective memory”, when our mind chooses to remember only the pleasant memories only and hides the nasty ones.