In the last year I’ve gotten into a habit of mainly posting my one-off drawings and paintings to Instagram, reserving this website for completed comics or comics-related announcements. I have just now realized, however, that as a result of this I have left no record here of my epic trip this past January to the “Cono Sur” of South America: Chile, Argentina and Uruguay, three fantastical and enchanting countries that I miss very much. Here, then, are a few of the sketches, either in pen or oil pastel, that I made on location of these places, many of which felt to me oddly familiar, like a reworking and jumbling together of various memories of the kind that occurs in dreams, held together by a tenuous logic that snaps apart upon waking.

Cerro Bellavista, Valparaiso, Chile

Extremely long and steep staircase in Valparaiso

Port of Valparaiso

Houses on stilts in Castro, Chiloe Island, Chile, looking like a Newfoundland of the South

Interior of the Iglesia de San Francisco in Castro, Chiloe, a huge church made entirely out of wood.

Street in Montevideo, Uruguay, with the brownish Rio de la Plata in the background (although admittedly it is not quite that brown, the exact colour eluded me this time)

A steady hand on the tiller of the Presidente Sarmiento, an 1897 Argentine naval cruiser moored at Puerto Madero, Buenos Aires. Photo credit to my Porteña guide in Buenos Aires and up-and-coming Borgesian autora, Belén Debuchy.