Sometimes we get out from our 53 squaremeters. And we go to someone else´s 53m2 place.
Eg: this small bar in a mountain spot, “La plazuela”. The owners live in the house, selling convenient goods for the people who live around, and serving drinks and meals. We met this old lady 12 years ago. And she still spends her time helping around, reading tabloids and talking to strangers. To her.
Once upon a time, I was in day 2 of a home handiwork personal challenge, when the time for the orbital sander came. This is one of the objects that made me start drawing all that fits in a 53squaremeters home. How comes we keep an orbital sander in such a small place?
Twice upon a time. A sander is a wonder to use after plastering and before painting. If only I had the dust container, on top of having the adapter. Hold it! Maybe that dust extractor adapter can go to the vacuüm cleaner pipe? I don´t get it. Anyhow, it blows all the sand away. Which makes you think of my sander fixing a brick wall as one of the 3 little pigs, huffing and puffing himself to avoid the Big Bad Wolf coming to blow the house in.
It´s the Little Sander versus the Big Bad Wolf.
From there, I came up with the illustration. No doubt I am becoming the busy little one. The one who does as mum says:
“The way to get along in the world, is to do things as well as you can!”.
I can´t believe I just said that.
But if the little sander wins, because I might be really doing things well for once (upon a time), somehow I would end up getting the Wolf in the kettle…So. Can anyone please send a good Big Bad Wolf recipe ?
It´s too late but I could not post this drawing before. Why?
I am testing myself by plastering, fixing cracks, and painting walls for 3 days time, instead of working in global, megasmart, supertop, or whatever adjective you can imagine I would give to my copywriting work projects in a public blog. I compared budgets for my job and for home repairs. And just know this plastering thing could be an option to leaving the country (recession is very motivating for skills improving).
And that´s what I said my neighbour I was doing in the backyard, stirring something in a bowl at the only sunny area there was. And she mentioned I seem to be a very hippy woman.
Tamarinda. A german sewing machine. My Christmas present. Now living in 53m2. I had to come up with something for her.
First it was sewing frills to cover all the room, the flat, the building, the neighboorhood…the city! All covered in frills. An art intervention using a metaphor of a granny-style industrial-proportions humanization of modern megalopolis. But intellectualizing these sort of ideas for those who enjoy reading brainy descriptions is so boring that, unless someone writes all rationals for me, I won´t cover Mexico DF in frills. No, please, do not insist.
Then I thought that designing pillows with characters was more reasonable for one night fun. If fun was the word. Cause this was the idea I came up with: (please click here), and it was such a pain to produce. Tamarinda got jammed once and again in the making. And I hate reading instructions (not to mention following them). Because I secretly wish every tool worked with just one on & off button, not needing to move an eyebrow for absolutely nothing but approving the presence in 53m2 of any new intelligent object, to make all the work for me.
Hours after uselessly trying a straight stitch, I ended up reading the complete handbook .
And it worked. So I questioned myself what would happen if I was a very poor woman with no resources but cotton production leftovers from the factory next to the bridge under which I sleep with my 7 sons. And where I found a sewing machine left by a mysterious passerby with no instructions, 10 years BZMHAM (Before Zara Mango and HM). A machine like Tamarinda. Let´s say, Tomatinda.
Rewind.
I was poor but found a sewing machine. Ah! And the passer-by is mysterious so my story sounds cooler. So. Would I learn how to use the machine just using my intuition, therefore having a tool to work in crafted clothing goods, using leftovers from the factory, getting myself out of poverty, starting up an empire of cloth crafts, and years later getting a Nobel Prize in Economy?
Or would I get so fucking desperate with the machine getting jammed all the time that I would prefer to stay poor but sane? Well. You guessed. But being positive, this is how I realized I can use my lack of patience as an excuse not to be rich, famous and laureate.
Dibugentear is a term I created for a show on drawing people. Here are some old drawings. Done at Borough Market in 2009, with my friend and exflatmate Robert Cervera, then a copywriter, now a promising sculptor. Today I did the colour. It´s quite funny to spend time looking at unknown people and trying to remember their hair colour. 
I don´t know how winter works for you, but for me, winter basically means long sleeping hours. I don´t go as far as hibernation. But my will does. So I came up with a trick to keep my blog updated. By scketchbook archaeology. Posting old outdoors drawings.
Revisiting the show that a very inspiring Spanish illustrator and visual chronist, Enrique Flores, has on Argelia in Galería Pelayo 47, other than feeling jelaous for the quality of the artworks, I felt compelled to do something, to show some work, no matter the quality. If I care about quality then I get blocked, missing all the fun in drawing for the sake of drawing. And of sharing.
At the show there are amazing watercolours and sketchbooks Enrique does when travelling, which he often does with another amazing illustrator, Antonia Santolaya who has her own fantastic works. Both their sketchbooks can be seen at 4ojos.com. I saw an original of those field drawing skecthbooks. Very neat, very well documented, when you get it in your hands you feel like holding the Book of Kells. I once asked E. Flores for the tools used . Yes. Like asking a photographer for the camera he uses, as if it was the camera. I’m a bit tocapelotas. Very fan of other people artworks, lazy to do my own. So when I like some visual stuff I copy materials and tools. And then wait to see if tools do the work for me. Anyhow, I got 3 Kuretake pencils, and took them with me in a recent trip to Egypt.
Thanks Enrique & Toña for inspiration to work! And to my husband for my new pens and for pushing me.
One day you get home and find your kitchen invaded by a giant pot. “What´s this?” -”Oh! it is a crockpot!”- “And what do we need this for?”. One hour of enthusiastic explanations later, you can just conclude that it is a hypertrophied pot that takes a minimum of 5 hours to cook whatever you want to.
At this point there is no more doubting. I am being gaslighted. I believe life is all about pressure cookers and microwaves providing me with instant rich and warm meals. Now I have to spend hours listening why I do need a giant pot in a 53squaremeters place, and remember programming hours before being hungry. Which is impossible as I am always hungry. As our friend Nacho puts it: “Amaya, you just don´t get it. Your love life is not about honey-what-are-we-having-for-dinner, but honey-what-are-we-having-for-dinner-on-wednesday?”.
As a temporary solution to my lack of patience for cooking, Mr 53 got me a mini-cocotte to start practising with the baby concept of taking care for food. It´s all the same, you also need to think what to put into it. And now I am only even more convinced that my stomach is the best pot for raw ingredients.
- Aunt Amaya?
- Yes?
- Are you seriously picking that up?
- Seriously, yes. Stay here, I´ll bring my car.
- But aunt Amaya?
- Yes?
- What if the owner comes?
- Well, this is a park, I just see an Egyptian temple around, and an old stationary bike totally abandoned under the rain. So unless it belongs to the mummy in the temple, a more than probable option considering this BH model, I am picking it up with me.
- Your house is too small, where are you putting it?
- I am doing an open-air gym at the patio. So I can exercise for free and avoid visiting terrible big cans of sweat and muscles, designed by psychos who place mirrors everywhere, where I can´t help watching my beer belly at all times.
- But your neighbours will watch you training
- They will.
- You are weird
- And you a droopy drawers.
Once in the car
- Aunt Amaya, I think the bike is very cool. You know, I had a BH California.
- I had my first, my second and my third bike from BH.
- They rock. But I still don´t understand why the owner would leave it here.
- Some people think other people can reuse. See your grandfather, his country house is all about abandoned furniture, that he restored.
- Aunt Amaya, what I don´t get is WHY they did not sell those things on the Internet. I just exchanged my broken bike for a PSP.
So this is my 13 years old nephew Dani: naïf when it comes to finding and picking up cool abandoned stuff retro , smart when it comes to get an Internet deal.
He will rule the world.
I will keep on cycling in my new open air gym, where I am currently reading the original English text of Alice in Wonderland, every morning as I get up.
And the drawing is about the above story, and about Alicia getting smaller in time to my pedalling.
It is a drawing for Dani.
Also because Dani is beta tester for Happy Thing, making lots of drawings for me whenever I need to test a workshop (hahaha, I´m evil). He recently decided to call his brothers and himself: “Happy Thing Studios”, because he believes whatever coming with the word “Studios” in it needs to end up in movie theatres screens being admired by everyone.
This is a pencil, and it´s mine.I think that entitles me to use it everyday.
It is late in the evening, I am playing SIM Social. I am playing SIM Social because I can´t sleep. I can´t sleep because I had some beers. I had some beers because months ago I met Iván and he told me about him joining Dibujo a domicilio. Drawings home delivered. They come home, you pose, they draw, like you are the queen sorrounded by your court painters. He told me about this awesome group of artists, and I inmediatly asked to volunteer as a model for them at 53 squaremeters. But the list was huge and it was not possible. So I forgot about it. Till they suddenly wrote me about it and we agreed on them coming today.
I will tell you more about them soon, as I have a deadline in 7 hours, and need to sleep my beer dose. But I couldn´t stop thinking how beautifully they draw; how wonderful did I feel with them, even if posing in my insecurity was all a challenge, and even if i just gave them 5 poses and too much giggling. Also a girl came to write a note, Manuela, and she really behaved not jumping over the wine (they even brought wine!) and the cheese while the guys were drawing. And I just decided to quickly draw and post this personal reminder to myself before I go back to sleep and wake up in Adland again. To remind myself that I do also have beautiful pencils, and it is all a matter of USING them. They belong to me. I am their master!
I promise to post Daniela, Ron and Iván drawings in my blog as soon as I get them. They use pencils as laser sabres. I feel so special now. Good night.
Excessive daytime sleepiness is a disorder I suffered for a week. Because I suffer from many disorders: one per week. I am a proud true lover of self diagnoses by stumbling upon them. And got really professional at it. Like last week, I suffered from this sleepiness. Then, today I found this package of decaf coffee in the fridge. Open. Apparently Mr.53 has been making me decaf coffee in the mornings for a week. Not his fault, it´s me who got it at my shop for white brands.To have some decaf at home. But Mr 53 takes no coffee at all, and inferred that I wanted to go decaf. ME! And so the charming prince brewed his sleeping beauty coffee with no coffee for a week. Yes, I am lazy and get my coffee done in the mornings. Yes, I rock. And sleep like a rock. Since I got my extra Z power.
The cure for my many diseases usually come by Mr53 ignoring my efforts to convince him that I really, really but, hey, I mean really, could die from napping too often or from having that last drink on a friday night. For example, I once called him years ago, cause I believed to have found a melanoma on my skin. It happened to be a cigarette burn from the previous crazy night. But before I remembered the how, I even sent a pic of it to Mr 53, to make him feel superworried for me, which, frankly, he never does. Mmmm. Another time I called him cause I believed I suffered pancreatitis, one morning I got an intense pain in my abdomen. Home alone, my diagnoses was that I had reached the age of 36 having consumed my lifetime alcohol share. It was not pancreatitis, but I had a parasitic infection in my stomach. Mr 53 never came to visit, as he already knew I would no die that time either. He is lucky I came back to live with him. He skipped the phone calls bit and kind of got a VIP pass to watch my multiple i-am-going-to-die moods unplugged on stage 1 (bed) while he watches the races on stage 2 (the couch). Welcome to Hypocondrestival!
Doctor said I was too hypochondriac when I was 6, and I left the place convinced that the word hypocondriac meant some serious illness and that was the end for little child Amaya. Seriously, I don´t want to die. Not without my coffee.
