PORTRAITS FROM CAMBODIA

 At last! After 5 years of searching !!! A new portrait technique to be able to accept orders from Cambodia.

Watercolor, Gouache, graphite and colored pencils on 100% cotton 300 g / m2 paper. Size: 51 x 36 cms.

In Cambodia in 2018 it was still very difficult to find good paper to paint. For this reason, on my last trip I carried a good pad in my suitcase, in order to be able to deal with a couple of jobs that this fall I also brought from Barcelona

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Exploring new drawing styles at the Battambang night market

After another four months trying to overcome the difficulties of drawing with the meager materials to my supply in Cambodia began to emerge new types of caricature more in line with local tastes.

I had focused my search on developing a technique that would facilitate to me illustrate travel books. I had been on my first trip to Asia in 2008 trying to find a versatile way of drawing that would describe the beauty of cultural contrasts people experience when they find themselves in remote places for the first time. However, my tendency to photorealism induced by my long period as a portraitist of "La Rambla" had kept me lost and confused for the last 10 years, until finally I felt caricature was giving me the key. Thanks to it, I began to notice that I could approaching people enough to go deeper into much more details of their culture than mere landscape or realistic drawing had allowed me until then.

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illustrating the fascination for travel

Very often we artists set ourselves up the most complicated challenges to force us to develop the ability to synthesize.

Dreaming Melaka (2013)

After returning from my winter period in Malaysia in May 2013, I found in my workplace in Barcelona an urban guard officer who forbade me to draw my style at the behest of a mafious group from the competition. For that reason my income during those two years had been reduced to mere survival, hoping that adjustments in the defective legislation which endorsed my claimants came into force in early 2015.

Siem Reap "Colors" (2017)

Thus during the two winters with no savings to travel, I had devoted myself to search in my studio for a technique that could dispense me the Kafkaesque torture that the district council inflicted me with its crass bureaucracy. For my experiments I used a photo taken in Melaka during my previous trip and after finishing a small oil painting I finds that the resulting style could answer my expectations as soon as I had the chance to travel again. 
When at the end of 2016 I finally got to test that technique in Cambodia I realized that there was something that did not convince me. It still took too long to finish a work and its development kept me bitterly away from the life itself that I tried to catch. So until I would clear about how to solve these problems I left aside that figurative painting based project and focused on developing caricature in order to achieve the same goal of escaping from Barcelona. 
My surprise came when I decided to try drawing a landscape using the same technique I was developing for my Cambodian caricatures. 

Siem Reap "Pub street" (2018)

The result reminded me a lot my past as a comic book drawer. I realized that I felt much more comfortable with that way of working than with the technical ambition that always attach a pictorial work, so I decided to explore this new style more deeply. For this, maybe had coming the time to justify my work in key of travel books illustrations; an old challenge that was reopening, by which I would had to get down to work as soon as possible, before this window of opportunity would close unexpectedly again at any moment.

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Teaching Art and Caricature in Cambodia

With his second winter as guest professor Albert Tarragó consolidates a Caricature workshop at the applied arts school of Battambang in Cambodia.

    As a drawing professional with more than 30 years of experience I felt the time had come to share my knowledge with new generations of artists in the same way someone shared with me in my beginnings.

Drawing tribute to "... his first day drawing in public"

   Since last February 2017 during

Barcelona's winter seasons ​​the applied arts school "Phare" Ponleu Selpak from Battambang in Cambodia offers me the chance to hold a caricature workshop for their art students, as well as other of figurative painting for students and teachers.

   From here I want to express my gratitude to all of them for their interest, and my hope that with time they can perceive the portrait and the caricature as a professional outlet for their immense creativity.

I also want to thanks all I learn from them since without any doubt it's as much or even more than they learn from me

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Caricatures in Cambodia 2016/17

Drawing cartoons in Battambang (Cambodia) with local materials

After several years of research this winter I was able, for the first time, to make caricatures with the colors and papers that I could find throughout my trip. This factor gave me full freedom of movement in my search for the most appropriate place to establish myself, but it was a terrible effort of experimentation, since with the new colors it took to me a lot of time to finish a job. Nevertheless, finally I encouraged myself to put a caricature stall at the Battambang's night market in Cambodia.

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Castellers of Barcelona, a spa for the soul

Series: Last work done

I Never before had understood the sense of the Catalan tradition of building human towers till I recently joined the large group of people of all ages that make up the 'Castellers of Barcelona'.

There are times in everyday life when we miss much teamwork and effort to achieve a common goal. It is in those moments when to form part of these human constructions gives you something, intangible but extremely intense, that soothes the spirit and comforts the soul. This drawing is a tribute to those in charge of the bar of rehearsal place.

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Season in exile, 2014

Series: Last work done

    Portrait and caricature are essentially "pure communication". Paper and pigments are worthless without the message being transmitted through them. Thus, drawing someone is like "talk to someone" and this "someone" choose an artist or another depending on the type of message or quality which it offers him.

A portrait, according to the dictionary definition, is the representation of a person through drawing or painting. However, at Las Ramblas of Barcelona free expression still were prohibited, so that portraitist style had to fit the concept of portrait than a city police corporal could understand. So, for the fifth consecutive year, this summer I was forbidden to "talk" spontaneously with humor on my job either in order to drawing attention of people or have fun with my drawings. This coercion recent months caused me so much anxiety that I had fallen ill.

For this reason I was forced to relocate my job to a small village on the Catalan coast. There, while awaiting the arrival of the high season, I was drawing new samples in absolute freedom in the hope of recovering the fullness of my faculties.

Llegir en català

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Repression in La Rambla of Barcelona

New chapter of Albert Tarragó's Graphic work catalog:

When to copying photos is called do portraits

           Twelve years ago, when a portraitist applied for a permit to draw people in La Rambla, then the City council examined him by asking him to draw a person in front a commission of experts.

            But after eight years on the street many portraitists had grown used to copying photos instead of drawing the people. To do this, they were using as a bait astonishing photorealistic drawings made ​​with the help of a projector such that hardly they could match its effect when the client was a person sitting before them. The disappointment caused by this widespread practice had been increasing distrust among the public, thus, the difficulty to find customers had risen while prices decreased to almost those of caricatures.

            But the worst started to happen the day it was the public administration itself and local police those who started to require the portraitists to exhibit those misleading portraits copied from photos as a sample for the public. Paradoxically, insisted, it was the only technique for which they had been autorized.

LINK TO THE NEW CHAPTER OF CATALOG

City police in Barcelona force the artist Albert Tarragó to draw portraits like "the others"

Police forbid him display "funny" drawings at his workplace by threatening to withdraw his portraitist license.

Albert wonders why, if there is such a problem, the City Council has not allowed him change its specialty to cartoonist the last two times he has renewed his annual permit.

    The small group of cartoonists who have been denouncing him the last five years gets consolidate its monopoly upon Cheap and funny drawings, even when a majority of the group of artists has been asking repeatedly the Council that don't differ specialties such as portrait and caricature .

    City Hall's argument has always been than "do not change anything because soon they're going to reform everything"

MALAYSIA, The pure portrait's refuge

New chapter of Albert Tarragó's Graphic work catalog

A six months technical evolution in a nation of beautiful cities overflowing with history and people with a captivating hospitality.A period during which the taste and sensitivity of Malaysian publics molded new concepts of portrait and caricature, with fully expectation and respect for creative freedom, without the existing bureaucratic restrictions from "La Rambla" of Barcelona.LINK TO THE NEW CHAPTER OF CATALOG

Malaysia, 1st chapter of the guidebook GLOBAL ART of international mobility

Tarragó Albert is the author of the first chapter of the "Guidebook of workplaces and cultural projects for artists in transit", which aims to be a collaborative handbook open to contributions from other artists and promoting entities.

The idea is to provide artist travelers, during their journey, access to places where to be able stopping to develop their creative activity and explore more deeply the local cultures.

LINK TO THE GUIDEBOOK GLOBAL ART (MALAYSIA)