Praeterita

One of my sketches from Cuba All right, I never actually met Nelson Mandela. But his death last week reminded me of something that happened ten years ago, when I was in Cuba. At the end of my third week in Havana, I decided to take a bus to visit the town of Trinidad de Cuba, about 150 miles east in the middle of the country. It’s a Unesco world heritage town because of the high number of well-preserved colonial era buildings, including an ornately decorated church in the centre. Well, on my first evening there, I ended up at a club watching some excellent musicians perform traditional Cuban son . I was sitting quite close to them, and sketching them while they played. This caught the eye of the trumpeter, and when the group finished their set he asked me if I would show him my drawings. When he discovered that I spoke reasonably good Spanish, he invited me to join him and his friends in the town square for an after-concert open air party. My feeling of good fortune and b...

Six drawings of the Malecon, Havana, Cuba, 2001 (click on image to embiggen) "Drawing and colour are not separate at all; in so far as you paint, you draw. The more the colour harmonizes, the more exact the drawing becomes."---Paul Cezanne.   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

Street vendor, Havana, 2001 "I draw like other people bite their nails." -- Picasso.   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

Bass player, Havana, 2001 “Let whoever may have attained to so much as to have the power of drawing know that he holds a great treasure.”—Michelangelo.   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader