Shortly after I started using watercolour, I began to avidly look for new challenges and new models to sketch. But, as it usually happens to me (and I guess other people share this feeling, too), when I take up a new activity or I start doing something, I always try to do it perfectly well, thinking about what I want to sketch twice beforehand and not being very self-confident. It happened to me that I was going to pay a visit to my parents and friends in the village where I lived for over 19 years. I would spend two days, so I wanted to come back with a sketch from that place, it didn’t matter what it was about, but I wanted it to be special.

Unlike other people, I don’t like my hometown even though I have good memories of it and my family lives there. It’s simply that I can’t consider I belong to that place nor to any other one as people normally do. I don’t feel a connection to the people living there except for my family and best friends. Maybe it’s sad or maybe I’m wrong, but I can’t force myself to feel something I don’t. In the same way, I can’t identify myself with a country, with a flag, with a language. I’m just a citizen of the world. And it is this fact I feel so proud of. Sketching is, as I understand it, catching a moment in a place and being able to catch the atmosphere no matter the location, the people or the culture you’re in.

That explained, I got to the village and I decided to sketch a kind of monument placed in a hill where I used to go with my friends to spend our time. I stayed the whole evening there with a friend talking about the monument: when it had been built, who had built it… In spite of having been in that place so many times, we never noticed the presence of the monument as we did that day. But we always valued that place, as we were normally intruders who had to jump over a fence or a gate to enter. There, we would talk about major issues we would care about (something that the rest of children or teenagers with the same age wouldn’t do, as they would be drinking alcohol or something like that).

The day I sketched the monument was really hot and sunny, and that’s what I tried to achieve. Made of stone, it reflects the season perfectly. In summer, it usually seems a pastoral landscape and it becomes the ideal place to read a book completely alone. In winter, the stone loses the warm tones it gets in summer and it’s a darker and colder place. What I like about it is that whatever the external changes, the religious sculpture at the top remains the same, watching the village and taking care of it.

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You can see my artwork on my Flickr account.