Ink on sketchbook page
2025
A Supertramp song popped up in the radio and the reaction was, “let’s make a drawing”. Music inspired, phonograph record label inspired drawing.
Acrylic on Paper
2025
A humble tribute to Brian Wilson, a “thank you” for what he did during the peak of his creative life, the album Pet Sounds.
After watching this eloquent breakdown of how the song was constructed in this video from David Bennet, one should give it even more credit.
God Only Knows is a song that our ears approve regardless, but understanding its layers of complexity make for a more complete experience; also it provides us with a better understanding of the artist and his creative process.
And the icing on the cake, is the two part video from the Youtube channel Behind the Sounds, “God Only Knows Part 1” and “God Only Knows Part 2”
Untitled (Sly)
Graphite on paper
2025
The world is just a tad less funky, but Sly will live on through the music he left behind.
Acrylic marker on acid free paper
8.5 x 11 in (21 x 29.7 cm)
2025
Phonograph record labels are cool. Drawing and painting phonograph record labels, a new obsession. It can start with the music (or not). The aesthetic of a label can drive the process. The rest is just work, like all other studio activity.
About Black Sabbath, the band…
Untitled (Velvet Underground & Nico)
Graphite on tracing paper
11 x 12 in, 28 x 30.5 cm
2025
I was still living in New York city when Andy Warhol passed away. I had not yet started probing art, but I remember the profound impact his passing had on the city.
Andy was a NYC fixture. He was a celebrity. Everyone was talking about his unexpected death, from truck drivers to coffee shop workers.
I think only Andy Warhol could have produced this album. The songs, the band, Nico, all seem a natural extension of Andy’s body of work. And his practice extended into film making as well.
I had seen Lou Reed perform at the Pyramid Club in the East Village. It was one of my favorite nightclubs, a place where locals hang out, instead of the mega clubs that catered to the tourists primarily. He is the author of all of the songs in this record.
This particular record is a masterpiece. It never gets old. And it is still ahead of our times even today.
According to an architect friend, world famous Brazilian landscape designer Roberto Burle Marx created the garden depicted in this drawing. The garden is located inside a nondescript shopping mall in a small town in the interior of São Paulo state.
I had been visiting Brazil a few years back, and I headed to the mall to check out their bookstore.
When I came across the garden it had just finished raining. The mall’s roof had openings above the garden, and you could feel nature inside the building.
This is not by any means a glamorous Roberto Burle Marx project. It resides in a humble location, but that is what makes it so special.
In 2021 Augusto dined at Alexander’s in North Park, San Diego, CA. That was during the tail end of the COVID-19 pandemic and they were passing out paper menus. He took advantage of that to create a sketch of one of the floral arrangements.
According to Augusto, he was doodling with a vector program, and the process revealed the starting point for the drawing paintings.
“I was trying to make brushes, which I’d use to eventually draw with the brush tool…”
The first building block, the striped square in the image above.
After many different trials, Augusto decided on the composition in the image below.
He had to make additional custom forms, such as the corners, the only parts that aren’t made from the initial building block.
In the non-digital ( the image at the very top ), Augusto created the drawing layer using charcoal with a straight edge. The curved lines were hand drawn and sometimes they were re-drawn/erased multiple times until Augusto felt they were correct.
Vestiges of the mistakes, smudges, are not erased. They are the tracks left behind from the interaction with the surface as the drawing is created.
The lettering is stenciled using painter’s tape. It’s not a very efficient process, since the porosity of the canvas surface, and the relatively crude stencil. Each letter is painted separately, until it dries, then the tape is peeled off and the next letter is painted. It’s a time consuming and inefficient endeavor, but Augusto claims it is the method that provides the best results for him.
“If they were perfect or letterpress-like, then I would not enjoy the making of the painting nearly as much; and I do not believe the end result would be as appealing.”