Drawings from Porto

In December 2013 I took a trip to Porto and started to make reportage drawings of the city. The architecture of Porto falls down the hill of the old town towards the River Douro Estuary. As the low winter sun cast shadows across rooftops, chimney stacks and ceramic tiles, what started out as interior and exterior studies and drawings in graphite, chinagraph and pencil became a study into capturing the abstract nature of the buildings. The line in this instance became a tool to define the edge of where one shape leads to another and began to define the space between both. As the pages turned in the sketchbook the lines became starker and more graphic leading to the overlapping and layering of scenes in a sequential manner.

These drawings are now one of the featured projects on the Reportager site dedicated to Reportage Drawing setup and curated by Gary Embury.