Time, place, and people
We had been sketching lighthouses before1: more than five thousand kilometers away from home2, along the coast of Maine. But we had never sketched La Farola together, our hometown's lighthouse, barely a ten-minute walk from where I grew up.
There are plenty of things to sketch around us, all the time. Places and buildings and people and artifacts to stop by. To stare and study carefully. Things to look with joy. But we rarely do.
What's far and different—the exotic—prompts us to take our phones out of our pocket to shoot and share more often than what's around us everyday. Not what's close by. But the distant and, in some way, disconnected from our own world.
Coming back home from the US made me look at my city differently. Now in Málaga, I look at what surrounds me, at the mundane, at the little things I've always given for granted. I seat in front of them and picture them in my sketchbook.
In some way, you can compare sketching to taking an Instagram photo for thirty or sixty minutes. With so much time to think about what I'm doing, each capture creates a strong connection to when, where, and with whom I was sketching; that's why I browse through them with nostalgia and joy.
According to Wolfram Alpha, Málaga, Spain, and Scarborough, Maine, are 5519 kilometers apart. ↩
