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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