Koldo Barroso - Art & Illusion

Interviewed by Erin Hammill

Koldo Barroso — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 18:21:46 +0000

I’ve been kindly interviewed by Erin Hammill. She asked me about my background, techniques. influences, motivations and I talked a little about the importance of Internet social media for artists today.

Erin Hammill is a young and talented artist from Ann Arbor, MI and she draws some of the most delicate and beautiful ink drawings I’ve seen with a technique called stippling.

Erin describes this technique at her Facebook page: “The technique I use is called stippling. The basic foundation for stippling are simple dots that when placed correctly form a complex subject or design. The amount of pressure applied to the tip of the pen will produce the exact size of dot you wish for your desired effect. Small soft touches of ink that placed together will produce an even or softly graded shadow. Each dot is placed carefully one at a time since working with ink may be unforgiving. Your work can not be erased if a mistake is made so you conscientiously place your pen and pressure.” Amazing, isn’t it?

Some of her works, which I love because of the Japanese influence, they also remind me of one of my favorite illustrators that I have mentioned before in this blog: Julia Fryer, who did the sleeve art for progressive rock band Premiata Forneria Marconi.

So don’t miss Erin Hammill’s work at her Facebook album and stay in touch with her in Twitter too. She’s one of the kind spirits and great artists who’s making the Art community in Internet better!

Giveaway winner June 09

Koldo Barroso — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 18:53:45 +0000

You commented and voted so the most popular character from the Workshop in June is:
“Woonkee Di Woonkee”

And the winner of the Character Workshop’s Giveaway in May is…
Yelena Shabrova

Yelena will receive a watercolor handcolored & signed print, with a Certificate of Authenticity.

I want to thank to all the people who are participating in the Character Workshop, it’s amazing to be able to do this creative experiment with you!

This month I will be posting more about Woonkee and probably also a little more about Candela the dollmaker, since he’s been another very popular character during the last month. Don’t forget that a new giveaway starts again, so the most popular character of the month will be given away at the end of July!

And, of course… Happy 4th of July to everyone in the US!

Let’s make a new Kooky Pet!

Koldo Barroso — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 22:15:17 +0000

Let’s go for the fourth pet at this collective creative adventure called Kooky Pet Workshop!

If you are new here, you can start becoming a Pet Creator right now by leaving a comment and sharing your ideas to make a new Kooky Pet. You can suggest things like: features, body parts, colors, any kind of adjectives, personality features, habits, and even objects… The admission’s deadline is next Thursday night.

By becoming a Kooky Pet Creator you will enter the monthly giveaway of a special signed print of the most voted Kooky Pet. The next giveaway is on the 15th on July.

And now, let’s be creative and give life to a new Kooky Pet!

Alexbagex

Koldo Barroso — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 06:00:52 +0000

‘Alexbagex’. Pencil drawing by Koldo Barroso, 2009

It’s a pleasure to introduce you to your new Kooky Pet Workshop: Alexbagex

He is a really nice fellow with a golden heart who wanders around picking up the dolls and stuffed animals that people abandon in the streets. He carries them in the numerous bags and pockets that he’s got in his body and repairs them one by one. Then, he looks for a nice home for the dolls, a place where a sad children is in need of a friendly toy, and makes them both happy!

For this drawing, I took the liberty to pay a little tribute to my new born nephew, Alex, who was born in Madrid yesterday. He may become good friends with Alexbagex although he doesn’t need a repaired toy. So this one is dedicated to Alex.

Alexbagex has been created with the following reader’s ideas and suggestions:

A living bag (Nisanne)
A large soft bag to carry the dolls and bears (Aiyana and Carolyn)
Comforts the forgotten dolls and teddy bears (Sarah)
Fuzzy (Oddfae)
Striped socks that go up past it’s knees (Naomi & Pat)
Really long legs (Zoe)
Frog shaped creature (Steven)
A mohawk of 6 horns, all different shapes, curls, and colors (Sarah Camp)
Tiny little ears (Miss Jody)
fluffy hands (Yelena)

All of these contributors will enter a giveaway of a signed hatercolored print of the most popular Kooky Pet of the month which will happen on the 15th of July.

DON’T FORGET that there’s a new Kooky Pet creation going on right now, so start leaving your ideas for the new pet at the next post of this blog.

WHAT IS THIS?

This drawing is part of a collaborative project called “Kooky Pet Workshop” and it was created from the ideas and suggestions of the readers of this blog.

If you want this pet to be part of this month’s giveaway, vote for it and leave a comment now!

ENTER THE PRINT GIVEAWAY FOR THIS MONTH

Participate and win a signed print! Vote for your favorite pet and leave a comment!

Changes

Koldo Barroso — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 17:14:21 +0000

I’m happy to announce some changes in my web site: Naomi and I have been doing some extra work during the last weeks, working on a new design for this web site.

This is the third design that we’ve done for the web site since it started in November 2007. The last design, which you can still see, it was launched only 6 months ago. You may wonder why do I change it again.well, the truth is that when we did it we didn’t have a lot of time to work on it so we decided to do something temporary until we could work on it with more care and detail. We always seem to be pretty busy between web designs, logo designs, web consulting, illustrations, the blogs, etc…

Another great thing about the new design is that it will feature a new Store where you’ll be able to buy my most popular works, such as limited signed and hand watercolored Glicee prints and original works. This means that I’m not selling prints on Zazzle nor any other third party anymore. My works will be only exclusively available at my web site and all of the products will be signed and carefully handed by me.

There’s more changes to come: the Character Workshop, which has been happening every Thursday, it will do on Fridays from now on. Besides that, it won’t be working for a couple of weeks now, since I need some extra time to put out my new web site design, but later it will be back regularly as always.

And… don’t forget that next week there’s a new Character Workshop giveaway for a hand watercolored signed print of the most popular Character of the month. It seems to be Woonkee Di Woonkee so far!

Favegan

Koldo Barroso — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 15:33:18 +0000

‘Favegan’. Pencil drawing by Koldo Barroso, 2009

Ladies & gentlemen: here is your new Kooky Pet Workshop: Favegan

This little pal is always hanging around the tables to eat the vegetables left on plates by the kids who don’t like green food. He’s favorite one is organic lettuce because it makes him green and gets him in a merry mood that allows him to fly upside down all over the place. He always loses his boots during the flight, so he gets grumpy again and comes down to look for more green food.

This Kooky Pet was created with the following reader’s ideas and suggestions:

Eats vegetables left on plates (Aiyana)
Knobby knees (Jody & Carolyn)
Shrew like nose (Sarah)
Only has a couple teeth Oddfae)
Red/orange tendrils (Kris)
Lot of little centipede feet (Zoe & Yelena)
Dragonfly wings (Friday)
Little cowlick on the top of his head (Colleen)
Some yellow and orange colors (Nadiia)

All of these contributors will enter a giveaway of a signed hatercolored print of the most popular Kooky Pet of the month.

DON’T FORGET that there’s a new Kooky Pet creation going on right now, so start leaving your ideas for the new pet at the next post of this blog.

Candela the doll maker

Koldo Barroso — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 19:40:08 +0000

‘Candela’. Pencil drawing by Koldo Barroso, 2009

This character is based on a true story. I met Candela in the late 80’s, at the Arts & Crafts market in Madrid’s Plaza the Santa Ana where I used to sell my sculptures and engravings every Saturday evening. She was standing on an empty spot in front of me, holding a huge carpet bag. In the other hand, she carried a beautiful doll that looked exactly like herself, with her little black eyes, her French bohemian look and her brushed wool beret. I remember I thought that she looked different than all the girls I’d met at the market, there was something strangely sophisticated and mysterious about her. She asked me very politely if I knew that spot was free so she could set her stand and I told her to go ahead. So I stood watching how she quietly opened the big carpet bag, setting a delicate mantle piece on the floor and carefully placing with ceremonious movements on it some of the most outstanding dolls I had ever seen.

I was completely amazed by the incredible expressibility of her polymer clay figures and the delicacy of the clothing. There was something definitely sad and captivating in all of her fantastic creations, yet they all seem to look so real that looking at them one would become a little restless. Now I was really intrigued about the maker of these wonders. I wanted to know everything about Candela.

She was shy and quiet in a friendly way. She looked pretty cold and careless by my enthusiastic admiration for her dolls. She told me that she was from Menorca, the Spanish Balearic island, and she had just come to Madrid to sell her dolls. She had no friends in Madrid, she said, and it was actually her first day in town. I thought she was a very brave person. I tried to make her feel confident during the evening, giving her tips about how to do good sales and the psychology of marketing to costumers. But soon I realized that this naive newbie was not the pupil but the teacher: her dolls were selling like hot cakes. I had never seen any artist doing so many sales in one evening! I felt like a stupid and presumptuous chatterbox.

When the market was over, I asked where she was going to spend the night. She said she had to look for a cheap hotel room, so I told her she could stay overnight at my place where I had an extra room. At the time, I used to live in a flat in the same neighborhood that once belonged to my grandparents. It was just a few streets down the market so it was really convenient, so I was used to always have someone new staying over night. Anyway, Candela looked so suspicious that I though there was no way on earth that she would accept, but she did. It’s strange but I remember hearing my inner voice saying it would be better that she didn’t. I felt a little nervous about talking to her, but once again I was so intrigued about her mysterious persona and her captivating dolls…

So we both walked up the four flights of the old wooden stairs at this typical Madrid 17th century house, carrying our big suitcases packed with dolls and sculptures. I remember I offered to lend her a hand with her big bag. She held tight to the bag, looked at me in the eye and with a severe voice said “no”. I later realized how attached she was to her artwork and her clone doll. Throughout the night, she didn’t move away from her bag for a single moment. I tried to make her feel comfortable, she had some tea and I drank a little red wine, and we talked about an array of interesting things: Todd Browning’s “Devil Dolls” film, the Black Light theatre of Prague, Vienna’s marionette’s theatre, Jim Henson… she was definitely an interesting person to talk to. She was not exactly my kind of girl, but at some stage I was starting feeling dangerously attracted by her cryptic personality.

But she looked so distant and ecstatic during the whole conversation… she would never look at me when she talked and she constantly kept her eyes nailed on this Candela replica doll that she held as if it was her own heart. Every few minutes, she would check the hour on the big grandfather clock in the room and when the twelve o’clock bells started ringing out she stood up and stroked the conversation as she had been eagerly waiting for this moment. I can still remember her words: “The night is short and tomorrow will be a long day”.

Detail of ‘Candela’

So I showed her the room where she could sleep. It used to be my grandparents room and I remember she was kind of fascinated by the old furnitures from the 20’s and the camphor scent. I said goodnight closing the door behind me and stood in the living room for a little while, drinking wine and listening to music, thinking about what a strange character Candela was. I remember being slowly dragged by a shade of melancholy and gray sadness, listening to Peter Hammill’s music and looking at some family pictures that I had just found in in a can box a drawer. I noticed that, ever since Candela entered the flat, the lights where kind of dim and foggy, or maybe it was just the red wine… I wondered if Candela and I would have something in common apart from our artwork, and I realized about how lonely we both were. I refused to be like her, I didn’t feel comfortable seeing myself just like a sad and lonely artist, wandering around like a ghost in a shallow city crowded with invisible people who would never had the slightest interest to understand the very soul of my artwork. And then I cried in silence.

The next thing I remember is waking up the next morning and noticing that she was gone. There was no trace of herself except for something she had left on top of the bed where she slept: a doll. It was a replica of me, Koldo, with my long curly hair, my small hands, my black and white tap-dance shoes and my old fashioned suspenders. It was almost frightening but I was really touched. I wonder how she managed to make the doll, working until dawn because the paint was still fresh. She must spent the whole night working on it!

With the hope that I would see the enigmatic doll maker once more, I picked up my things and headed to El Rastro, a popular antiques and crafts market in Madrid where I used to sell my artwork on Sunday mornings. But she was not there. It was a long and uncertain time until I got to see Candela again.

To be continued…

WHAT IS THIS?

This drawing and this story (16+ y.o.) are part of a collaborative project called “Koldo’s Character Workshop”.

If you want this piece to be part of this month’s giveaway, vote for it and leave a comment now!

ENTER THE PRINT GIVEAWAY FOR THIS MONTH

Participate and win a signed print! Vote! Leave a comment and tell me:

Would you like to see the rest of this character develop?

What do you like most about it?

Do you have any suggestions?

Pukaniwani

Koldo Barroso — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 06:00:49 +0000

‘Pukaniwani’. Pencil drawing by Koldo Barroso, 2009

It’s a great pleasure for me to introduce you to our first collective pet at the Kooky Pet Workshop: Pukaniwani

This funny fellow plays Hawaiian songs on his ukulele and sings all day long to attract exotic hummingbirds who feed from the wax in his ears, which tastes like honey. If you have more information about Pukaniwani please share it with everyone else.

This Kooky Pet was created with the following reader’s ideas and suggestions:

A ukulele (Naomi & Tzaddi)
Webbed feet (Sarah)
Big puppy black dog eyes (Amber & Nicole)
Big whiskers long enough to make a tie (Francisco)
Large ears are perfect for hummingbird nesting (Colleen, Sue & Zoe)
Wild hair (Lori)
Top hat (Jacob)
Bucked teeth (Jody)
Big fingers with claws (Yelena)
Long hangy jowels (RJ)

DON’T FORGET that there’s a new Kooky Pet creation going on right now, so start leaving your ideas for the new pet at the next post of this blog.

Folker Krause

Koldo Barroso — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 20:23:11 +0000

‘Folker Krause’. Pencil drawing by Koldo Barroso, 2009

We have heard before about the enigmatic figure of Raisa Zakharova, the Russian woman who was in the spotlight of Victorian society after her famous séances using a ventriloquist doll to channel the spirit of her deceased husband. Now it’s time to unveil more about the figure of her husband and mentor, the reputed German illusionist Folker Krause.

While the the few records about Lady Zakharova portray an enigmatic and contradictory figure, rivers of ink had been used to write about Folker Krauser because of his fraudulent practices as an illusionist and conjurer.

Folker Krause started in show business at the early age of six, when he started working as a stagehand assistant at the Lyceums of Paris. He was introduced to the techniques about the art of magic while watching the performances of the reputed British magician Angus The Wizard from backstage. At the age of 16, Folker started his magic training with Angus The Wizard in order to perform as his partenaire. He only managed to work on stage for a couple of months. It’s been said that he didn’t have the required skills to be an illusionist, but rumor has it that he was actually fired by Angus for selling some of his secret techniques to a British illusionist for a large sum of money.

After this episode, Folker Krause moved to London to start his own magic show. Today, it is known that most of the tricks performed on his show had been pirated from the celebrate French illusionist Robert-Houdin, father of modern magic. He allegedly acquired the tricks from Robert-Houdin’s mechanic Le Grand and changed a few features to present them as his own creations.

In 1836, Krause took a young Russian lady, Raisa Zakharova, as a partenaire and became her mentor. Newspapers wrote about her as the most beautiful lady ever seen on stage, which leads to the idea that Krause used her physical beauty as an extra incentive for the audience to assist his shows. A proof of this is that his most celebrate magic number “The Progressive Disappearance of Lady Zahharova” is still considered by many magic historians as the first strip tease show in the history of show business.

The relationship between the magician and the beautiful partenaire has been described in chronicles as turbulent and sordid. Raisa Zakharova has always been portrayed as a woman who was completely devoted to and fascinated by the figure of the magician. Some people believed that at some extent he practiced hypnotism on her to control her will. Contrary to Raisa, Folker Krause was only devoted to himself.

He was always surrounded by a court of female admirers who were willing to oblige and he would visit the most bawdy places of the cities wherever he performed. But the last straw was his long affair with a very young cousin of him, Liduvina, who also worked as a stage partenaire. It is believed today upon recent examination that, consumed by the jealousy towards Raisa and with the ambition of becoming the first partenaire and marrying the magician, Liduvina manipulated the number of “The Tamed Arrow”. This consisted of Lady Zakhariova stopping an arrow through her own will power that was shot with a bow by the magician. The trick failed and Raisa lost her right eye. She was supposed to die on stage that fatal night at London’s Drury Lane Theater.

At the peak of Krauses’ career, both Raisa and Folker were accused of espionage by the secret services of Imperial Russia. Liduvina was the informant, who had completely lost her mind from jealousy. She had a perfect plan to save Krause’s life from execution: the magician would accuse Raisa for all the espionage issues and he would move out of the picture, getting rid of her at the same time. But something completely unexpected happened because, the same cruel man who had been humiliating and harassing his devoted wife so badly, in a sudden demonstration of unconditional love to her, denied all accusations of her and put all the blame on himself.

Folker Krause was severely tortured to death in front of his agonizing wife. She was later tortured with no mercy and her hands were cut off. The legend tells that she managed to escape from her executors by using some sort of control tricks that she had learn from her husband. Then she ran away to France carrying the inert corpse of his lover.

Nobody knows whatever made Folker Krause have such an unpredictable prove of eternal love with the woman that he had treated with such cruelty during his life. It has been said that, in the bottom of his heart, he was always deeply in love with her. But an eerie and destructive side of his psyche stopped him from showing his true love. Folker Krause was himself the victim of his own contradiction. What do you think?

More about Lady Zakharova & Folker Krause:

Create your pet at the Kooky Pet Workshop!

Koldo Barroso — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 15:17:46 +0000

Today is the perfect day to start a new creative adventure with you: a collaborative project called Kooky Pet Workshop! It’s going to happen every Tuesday here on this blog. The Kooky Pets will be the stars and together we will be their makers.

What is the Kooky Pet Workshop?

Every Thursday, I will pick one idea from the ones that each one of you has suggested and I’ll put them all together. Then, I will draw a sort of Frankenstein Pet with your ideas and will give it a name. The resulting drawing will be posted at the Kooky Pets Workshop every Tuesday. Don’t forget to vote for your favorite Kooky Pet for the monthly giveaway!

What for?

The goal of this new collaborative project is to together create a collection of imaginary pets that I will be drawing following your ideas and input. I have seen that you are creative and imaginative people and I’m sure this it’s going to be a fun and productive adventure!

One of the ideas for this project that I’d love to see developed in the future is to publish a special pack of trading cards with the images of the Kooky Pets that we have created. How much do you like that idea?

How can you take part of this?

You can start becoming a Pet Creator right now by leaving a comment and sharing your ideas for the 1st Kooky Pet of the Workshop! You can suggest things like: features, body parts, colors, any kind of adjectives, personality features, habits, and even objects… Here is an example of a few things that could be suggested for a new Kooky Pet:

Big red eyes
Pig tails
Timid
Snores
Female
Likes bananas
Cowboy hat
Fork

What do you gain from participating?

Of course, by becoming a Kooky Pet Creator you will enter the monthly giveaway of a special signed print of the most voted Kooky Pet. You can read more about the give aways here.

By the way, you may ask yourself: what’s going to happen to the Creature Workshop that has been already running at the blog? It will still keep working, same as before, with a new posts every Thursday, of course. Besides that, I’m changing it’s name to Character Workshop so it doesn’t get confused with the Kooky Pet Workshop.

And now, dear friends, let’s be creative and give life to the Kooky Pets!