Give Me A Title

I want to invite you to take part to my new "GIVE ME A TITLE" Competition, starting today. The last one has been won by Deran, from USA, with the wonderful title

"Making Sense of Static"

It is very simple: just give me a title for the following creation:



You can leave the title here as a comment, and I´ll add it myself to the list of the other titles in my website Goodaboom, or you can go directly to the competiton page Give Me A Title.

By the way: there is something to win: a hand-signed A5 reproduction of the painting.

Good Luck and thanks for participating!

The Christmas Cafe Crem Competition

I´ve got a new idea!

“Oh dear”, you might think, “Miki is on a roll again!”

Yes, I am, the simple truth being that I can´t live without new ideas…

So here it is:

I am here announcing officially the Christmas Cafe Crem Competition. The rules are quite simple, and there is a big box full of Christmas stuff to win.
For more info and participation, please go to Café Crem, or contact me here...

He gets Rumblies in his Tumblies!

Today I want to say a big big thankyou to my partner Kev Moore playing a very special role in my painter career, forcing himself to eat kilos of yoghurt every day -vanilla is his favourite, and straciatella is not bad either...
What has this to do with me as a painter, you may ask...
Very simple. In this way he provides me continually with the enormous yoghurt pots which I use to put the water in awhen I paint, especially with gouache or acrylics. I use a lot of them, because I am quite delicate with that, and hate to use a pot twice. Considering how much I paint everyday, one can imagine how many yoghurt pots I need ...
Sometimes, he really looks like a big bear eating honey, my Kevin..

A girly evening with Champagne

Yesterday morning Kevin drove to Valencia, to catch a plane to Germany, Lübeck, where he had a BC Sweet gig in the night. Before I met him, I didn´t really know how it is to fear for somebody when he is on the road, or in the air! Well, now, I know, and I can tell you; it is AWFUL! I can´t help thinking, everytime, that it could be the last time ...

Knowing of my pain, my beloved niece NanoO came to visit me in the evening, bringing a bottle of Cava (kind of Spanish Champagne) and a ready to cook pizza. Funny, with the Cava....
"Maset et Carpon",
was the name, obviously based on one of the famoust French Champagne called:
"Moet et Chandon"
hoping to catch some tourist or uneducated native... Knowing the French and their pride, I guess they would be gravely offended if they knew!

But my niece and me, both French, are quite relaxed with such things and just enjoyed the stuff and its tiny bubbles!
We had a lovely evening together, laughing a lot, and she was kind enough to pose for me for some fast sketches...
That girl is a beauty, as you can see, but don´t think twice: she is already taken!

Darkness in my soul...

Yesterday afternoon we mounted my exhibition in the Eye Clinic. The first painting I put on the wall, in front of the entrance door, was the biggest one, the one from Polop I presented in my last entry (but without the gay flag, of course!).
The reaction came at once:
"It is so dark and so big... don´t you have something else?"

Saying that, his face told such an horror story that if I were not so well-educated, I would have left at once, with all my paintings. Instead of that I humbly hung the painting where he said, on another wall which is most of the time hidden by an open door to another room. The other paintings, luckily, were brighter... although by one of them, the man said:
"I guessed Hamburg..."
and it was featuring a harbour here in Spain... 2 kilometers away from the Eye Clinic location! My fault I guess, as i painted it in northern colours...

I wanted to show you today some photos of the exhibition, But I was so fed-up that I couldn´t do any... and the rest of my day was spoiled! People sometimes are so cruel with us, artists. I don´t even believe they mean to be, and perhaps it´s only me who has such an extremely high sensitivity...

But don´t worry, I´m fine now, and all my energy is back.
I have just started the new "Give me a Title" competition on Planet Goodaboom. Feel free to participate and... there is something to win!
Here is the painting featured in the competition:

Gays and Guns and Roses...

And the story goes on...
Yesterday we had a good and funny lunch in Benidorm with my parents and other members of my family.
The same day as the Mayor was shot, I had dinner with my parents and I had spoken with my mother about the case. She was not as shocked as me, perhaps because she is older and wiser. She hadn´t even given the thing such an importance.

In the middle of the lunch the case came to mind again.
"By the way... do you know that the Mayor finally died?"
I asked her.
"Yes... and do you know why?"
"Well... There were some suspects at the beginning, a French couple and an English couple, all because of some property disputes around a new road...
"Nooooooo!.", corrected my mother, "the suspect French and English couples were not even there when it happened... no.... the Mayor´s wife, 5 years ago, after finding her husband in bed with a man, tried to commit suicide by throwing herself out of the window. She survived, but in a wheelchair, and they divorced. Now they say that it is only a story of jealous gays..."
I couldn´t believe my ears and almost choked on my food!
"How do YOU know that? from the TV?
"No... from Isabel..."
Isabel is my mother´s cleaning lady, an enormous 50 year old, local Spanish woman who always knows everything about everything.

As soon as I was home I made some research on the Internet and couldn´t find anything concerning Isabel´s theory. It seems that The Guardia Civil still hasnt´a clue what happened. But I wonder: if they had, would they say?

Now I don´t feel comfortable with my exhibition in memory of the Mayor, Not that i despise gays -I don´t care-, but a murder between jealous gays is surely not worth an exhibition of my work!

Anyway I don´t take any responsibility for the theory postulated in this entry!

Solo un recuerdo... Just a memory!

Just a memory... the title of a song written and composed by Kev Moore!
Solo un recuerdo, my first contribution to Kevin´s Music Career as we met: I translated "Just a memory" into Spanish... but this is another story, and he might tell it to you one day, and even sing the song to you then... in Spanish of course.

In honour to the dead mayor and its beautiful town Polop, I have totally changed the theme of the exhibition which I will mount on Friday in a local German Eye Clinic. (It´s not just for German eyes, it´s an eye clinic run by Germans)

I decided to exhibit landscapes from the region, of course some views of Polop itself, some of Altea, another beautiful town by the sea, a tourist centre but still with its own charm. A town of artists too... And some views of others villages in the mountains.
All painted in pastel and ink, the basic drawing in ink made in situ, and the colours -my colours, nothing real- having been added at home later.

I hope the doctors from the eye clinic do their job well and their clients will be able to see, that they feel compelled to take them home... at least as a souvenir from their wonderful time in the clinic...

Don´t´believe this exhibition is a commercial trick, it is not. i just feel the need "to exhibit my feelings" about the tragedy in my own way. All these paintings have neither been exhibited nor shown to anybody before. Just to you, 2 days ago, with the first sketch of Polop, and now today, this view of Altea Harbour.
This is not about selling paintings, it´s solo un recuerdo...

Smartie, The Angels and Spain...

Just for the ones who don´t know:

1. what Smartie is
2. who the Angels are
3. How Spain looks like

Smartie, the Angels and Spain wish everybody here a nice week-end!

The Bulls are fighting Me...

About four years ago, I started making bullfight paintings, not really because I thought it would be a good commercial idea, but just because I have always been fascinated by everything touching "bullfight".
Please, don´t blame me. I hadn´t even learnt to walk as I was taken into a bullfight arena, again and again. Its colours, odours, music, movement, have always been a part of my childhood. I know that it looks different, but I must insist that my love for bullfight doesn´t say anything about my cruelty and so on. I love animals, I care for them, surely more than most of the anti bullfight militants! It´s just that when I am looking at a bullfight, I am in a kind of trance, and I don´t see the bull as a poor, helpless animal, not even as an animal. Much more as a part of a lively piece of art... like the bullfighter himself.

I painted a series of bullfightI, exhibited them, and well, sold them all very soon. Everybody around me told me that i should make more, and I did. I sold them too. Then they started to say that I should specialise in bullfights, and paint nothing else. I started again, but very soon I stopped. I started to feel an extreme boredom, and imagining painting that stuff all my life killed me! I didn´t even exhibit the last ones I had painted.

Just last year I was expressly asked to exhibit some again, and I did. Here, and in Almeria. But I refused to paint any new ones.

The bulls are coming back now, with reunited force! I have been contacted by a company making calendars. They may make a 2008 calendar with my bullfights, 2008 being the year of the bull in the Chinese calendar. A good thing for me, but there are problems with the photos I should provide, I haven´t enough or of good enough quality, as I am not the most disciplined painter in cataloging my paintings...
We will see... I just hope, if it works, that he wont´ make a bullfight painter out of me for the rest of my life! But right now it looks like the bulls are winning the battle. I´m sure that some people will say that I deserve it, having painted so many of these poor suffering animals...

Me, rushing back from Benidorm yesterday night, where I looked at the final of the Rubgy World Cup with my parents. If you want to see the beautiful gift I got from my mother there, have a look at Rug Mug,
I know, our Smartie looks much better in reality than on my painting, but well, cars are not my speciality. I´ll work on it, I promise.
I rushed because the night before, in a small town called "Polop de la Marina", five kilometers away from here, the Mayor has been shot through the open window of his car as he arrived home, 3 bullets in the head. This is the kind of things from which one always thinks, they happen somewhere else. As I was driving home late in the night, I just imagined a sniper waiting for me at my home... awful! I´m normally not such a "poule mouillée" (a wet hen, as we call fearful people in France!), quite the contrary. But somehow yesterday I felt very uncomfortable and when I arrived home, I looked more than one time around before I went out of the car!
And as you see: I´m still alive!

To Be!

This is my answer, today, to yesterday´s question!
I woke up in a better mood, well at the end yesterday was a very positive day, I just missed Kevin and didn´t feel human any more! This is the problem when one loves too much... one doesn´t exist anymore when one is apart!
I know, I am a little bit excessive, but please, bear with me!

And as you can see, I am back to work today... I feel definitively bigger than yesterday -oh God, I felt so small !- still a little bit pale and quite distorsed in the face, the head still hidden behind a book, but not so much and at least it is a sketch book today!
Even drinking my milk coffee out of my M Cup, a sign that I am on the best way back to my human identity!
Just Mousy, our neighbour, a friendly rosa mouse who cares for me when Kevin is away, still looks quite worried up to me... I guess she doesn´t trust the nonchalance which I exhibit in my chair... she is not daft, I would say!!!

Bad a Boom!

In the middle of the night, a big bang awoke me. So loud that I really thought, in the first moment, the world is exploding, or at least our little home. But in the bedroom, everything was ok, except for the fact that my Kevin was not laying in my arms. In fact, he was not laying anywhere. The clock showed 4.AM.
I was still gathering my mind as I heard a shout coming from downstairs. It sounded like
"Frigging Computer!"
I got up, went down the stairs and found my Kevin sat on the sofa, in full Guevara Gear, all green in the face, tapping like crazy on the keyboard of his frigging computer.
"What are you doing?"
"Well, I´m trying to deactivate the remaining 5 power stations in America!"
Oh God, I thought.... my Kevin is not the most patient one, concerning computers.
"And?"
"One just went up in the air... and the next is about to!""
One second later a big Boom came out of the computer.
"My God, Kevin, we are supposed to be Good a Boom, and not Bad a Boom! What will people think!"
Kevin went even greener
"Baby, I have just blown up 2 American power stations, and you are just concerned about what people will say?!"


By the way: Have you an idea what I´m writing about, here? A guess?
Well, we are watching every day, late in the evening the American series "24". We love it, and are quite engaged in it, having all the time discussions about everything that happens there. So engaged that my Kevin, tonight, dreamt of it and woke up with the imperious necessity to try to help Edgar to deactivate the override device.
After the 2 explosions I forced Kevin to go back to bed.
I wonder what they will say in CTU tonight, when they see the mess... will they be able to trace Kevin´s frigging computer?

The Coffee Cup Club

2 days go I had an idea, which I think is a good one. Faithful to my character not to think twice, I brought it to life yesterday, opening "The Coffee Cup Club".
And today I present there "Mona Piedra", The first Lady in that place.

If you want to know what it is all about, and why I had to contact Paolo Coelho today, just PRESS HERE!

Don Quixote at Tripology!

(Drawing by Kev Moore)

When people see my artwork on the net, and take time to leave me a message saying
"This is beautiful!"
then I think:
Life is beautiful!
and I have to thank these people for making my day!

And so it happened, Once upon a time, that I got some connection to a company called "Tripology" ... A strange name , isn´t? (well, Goodaboom isn´t less strange, is it?!!!) At least it´s what I thought in the very first moment, and I didn´t see the connection till I read what it is about. You want to know? Press here!

Anyway... this is how we came into contact. Good vibes from the very first beginning, I must say: kindness, enthusiasm and dynamism.
Some days later we were invited aboard, with the possibility to bring another guest with us.
Being guests ourselves in this wonderful country which is Spain, who else but their national hero Don Quixote could we have chosen?
If you want to know how Don Quixote deals with the situation at Tripology, follow Don!

Kev Guevara...

I guess you will read it somewhere else: it is raining ropes (direct French translation) and thundering on Planet Goodaboom since last night. I´m normally not so unfond of rain, always succeeding in finding in it a certain romantic component, at least in the sounds it makes on the roof... well, and the melancholy it awakes, this is romantic too! But enough is enough, we have spent the whole summer under the rain in the United Kingdom!
Kevin, according to his weather affected disorder, is fedup, totally fedup. I hear him moaning all the time, in the background but still louder than the thunder. He was trying to write his new novel, but he was disturbed all the time, by phone calls, and perhaps by me too, and when at last we left him alone, the electricity started collapsing all the time. At the moment it is quite stable, but Kevin has lost his famous patience and decided to write an outraged essay about the weather in Spain. I thought I shouldn´t miss the opportunity to show the public how he looks like when he is fedup, him from whom the whole world says:
"He is The Nice Guy of Rock"
He is indeed, but when it comes to weather, he is unforgiving!
Anyway, I made a fast ink sketch of him, coloured it, and look, here he is, in the worst mood you could ever see him. I cannot help to find a certain similarity to Che Guevara, today...

By the way: do you know what is going on in his head while I am tenderly massaging his back?
Have a look to his Ashes on the Wind!

Am I a Hermit?

Sometimes, on Goodaboom, we live totally isolated from the rest of the world... Kevin is always moaning, kindly but still moaning, complaining that we live by the sea and never see it! Well, it is quite true. My fault, I guess. I don´t really like to go out here, don´t really enjoy the town anymore. It has changed so much since I moved here the first time, the tourists, the natives and even the weather have become more unfriendly. The scenery and the sea might be so wonderful, but I just feel some unpleasant vibes in the air when I go out and it brings me down.
An example... as our fridge became emptier and emptier until it achieved a state of total emptiness yesterday, we decided to go shopping after the swimming. Everything was closed: the swimming pool, the shops, In fact they had all been closed since Saturday and we hadn´t noticed! Really, the rest of the world could implode sometimes and we wouldn´t notice!
And Kevin being incapacitated with the Cold from hell and out of action in the meanwhile I had to go shopping by myself today. Oh God, I hate it so much, and if it were not for my Kevin who is missing his cereals with hot milk and really needing them today, I wouldn´t go...
"Be careful!"
he said, as I kissed him goodbye.
"Careful of what?"
"Well.... One never knows!"
One never knows indeed! And what happened to me in the hour I was away is like something from a movie! In the supermarket carpark, near the entrance I was jostled by a wildly running guy who 2 meters away from me assaulted another.... They started hitting at each other, wordlessly, very agressively in the face, they fell to the ground, one after the other, and got up again, continuing to hit like men possessed. In the meanwhile an old lady, who seemed to belong to one of them, came out of the supermarket, tried to speak to them and, evidently stressed, lost her consciousness, falling to the ground. At the same time a supermarket worker ran out of the supermarket and tried to separate the fighters, but was knocked to the ground. I stood there, transfixed, very close, trying to escape inside the supermarket, but they had closed the doors and didn´t let anybody in or out. Luckily 2 police cars arrived soon after, and i just saw how two policemen tried to stop the fight but couldn´t and had to be helped by 2 others. Totally oblivious to the Police , the two men continued to fight like animals! In the meanwhile the doors were opened again and I disappeared inside. I am not fond of such scenes, not like all the people inside who were gathered by the windows greedily drinking in the scene.
It was just awful. One might think:
"It´s their problem!"
but it is not, It is my problem too, because it touches and hurts me very deeply. I totally hate aggressiveness, in thought and deed, and it makes me sick to witness it. It saddens and depresses me deeply to see how thin the human "skin of culture" is. "Society´s thin membrane" says Kevin. How difficult it is to live in that society, and how problematic all kinds of relationships are.
This is one of the reasons why some people think that I am an Hermit. Maybe I am, but not by choice. Just because I am too sensitive to all that happens outside...

Our little house on Planet Goodaboom...

We had a green molecules rain this afternoon on Planet Goodaboom, just upon our little house. I wonder if they are some kind of primitive Martian Creatures... Our hair curled up to the sky and our heads felt like millions of tiny antennae, but until now we haven´t be contacted.

Busy busy at our little home today! Much painting and writing...
Especially Kevin, who is becoming a words machine, cannot stop writing anymore, short stories, diary, travel tale... if I am his muse, as he claims, then I must say: I do my job pretty well!

Who knows where it came from but that afternoon I saw a woman´s head. Only the head. The female eyes were staring at Kevin. The mouth opened, and from the lips there extended a very long tongue which ended in an enormous crawling yellow spider. The spider scrabbled all over Kevin´s face. Then the head disappeared suddenly but came back some seconds later, and the same scenario happened again. Awful! At the end, quite annoyed that a female tongue was licking my Kevin´s face, I took a pair of scissors and cut the tongue. The spider exploded in a thousand blood tears on my face and the head disappeared for ever.
Whoever has already read Kevin´s new short story "Room without a view" , knows where my vision comes from.
Who hasn´t, should be careful if he/she has sensitive nerves...

Vive le Petit Prince!

(Le Mouton du petit Prince, by Miki...)

I have discovered today that I can put a lot of private information on my blog profile, such as my favourite movies, music, books, etc... I normally don´t´like to lock up my interests in such "drawers", but the drawers here are bottomless, and this is much more comfortable for me!
Each movie, music or book you write in your profile is a link which, when pressed, gives you a list of all the profiles who also chose it. And of course when you enter these profiles, the same happens again, they are full of links to lists of people who love some special book, music or movie. Well done, really, because in fact I think that the books and movies one loves say a lot about oneself, perhaps even more than the blog entries themselves!

The result was amazing. I listed "Le petit prince", as my favourite book. Indeed it is, without any competition. I already read it in French, Spanish, English, German and even Russian, just because it gave me the opportunity to read it again and again, just "slightly differently", giving me the wonderful feeling I have more than one favourite book! Interesting too to notice the translation differences, but well, this is another matter. I was amazed to see that 2600 people had elected this book as one of their favourite books! I couldn´t believe itI I browsed a while through their profiles, all people from very different countries, ages, professions, males, females...
I wonder... I have no idea how many members we have here, but considering the quantity of books there is in the world, I guess this qualifies as a very good result. It would interest me, by the way, which are the 10 favourites here... Somebody knows? Or knows how to find it out? I have the strange feeling the people here like much "deeper" books than the ones which are in the bestseller lists of the world... Anyway, I wonder, as I said... I would mean the world would be a better world with so many little prince fans. I believe one must have a very tender heart and soul to understand and love this book.. although, perversely, I read once that St Exupery was not the tenderest man in the world, especially to his wife!!!

So where are they all these tender, deep people... only in the Cyberspace?

A Rock Star in the Night...

Kevin furtively leaving the house this morning, at 5h30...
Trying to escape I guess...
from the Fan-atics... ?
or from his most engaged Fan, me? Yes, from me I guess.
No chance, Brother: Big Sister is watching you, always!
"
16h42... sounds like "24"!
The Rock Star apparently left the country. I just got a text from him:
"... just had to text you from here, I have one hour in Göttingen..."

Such a strange feeling for me to imagine Kevin in Göttingen Railway station. I have been there so many times myself! I spent about 15 years in Göttingen, the first ones very happy, as I was studying maths & physics at the University there. And then... then I managed to meet the wrong man and it was hell!
Anyway I liked Göttingen very much and I often took the train there to travel abroad. I want to go back there, one day, with Kevin, THE RIGHT MAN, in the footsteps of my lucky past... Probably on the way up to Norway, perhaps next year, in our Boomobile.

Me and You, today..

Sad. Paralysed. Both.
Me, the feeling to think wrong, to do wrong. Not to be able, sometimes, to control the darkest thoughts of my brain.
I have been told, I don´t accept my happiness. It is more complicated than that. I might have lost the connection to reality, these last few days. I have been caught into a net of totally wrong hypotheses which lead me to horrible conclusions.
I know, I´m good at that, I´m a mathematician with my heart and soul, and my brain seems to find deep satisfaction in the construction of awful abstract buildings, locking me inside to see if I can find the way out..
And then, of course, I shout at You "help me out, help me out!"
You cannot help me out because you cannot see where I am.
I am too complicated, you say.
I am complex, I answer. But for me is this complexity so transparent, I can describe and logically explain each of its elements. But I feel alone within my elements which nobody else recognises...

I have just started to read a book: "The incarnation of Frida K.", a painter too. "I was born in rain, and I will die in rain", And even if I have no idea how I was born and even less how I will die, it is how I feel today. And it is how I make you feel.

Forgive me, please.

You forgive me, always.

And you do much more than that. Suddenly I feel the tenderest lips on my neck whispering the most important words of my life:
"I love you, my Miki..."

I love you too, my Kevin