Calle La Torre

To really understand the diversity of the Spanish High Street, I did a little experiment. This involved photographing every shop on a street that regularly walked down from my hotel - Calle La Torre. This developed into an extremely revealing visual research exercise. It forced me to analyze and understand my subject matter by looking at each of it’s constituent parts. I am always amazed by what you see when you really look and how rewarding this is when you have time to do it. (click images to enlarge)

More about Shops...

Through the eyes of the metropolitan Graphic Designer the visual language employed by small shops in places like A Coruña is probably naff and unfashionable. They break almost every textbook rule of branding - inconsistent typography, conflicting logos, confusing signage (one bar doesn’t even indicate what it is!) However, these are businesses with individual personalities that cannot be communicated through a ‘catch all’ homogenizing identity. They are very far away from the niche aesthetic developed by an art school elite and have no marketing focus group to decide what is right for them. Their vernacular identities are not to everyone’s taste. They are often brash and ugly, badly executed and sloppy, but this is what makes the high street in places like A Coruña so diverse and visually dynamic. Their visual identity relates to what these businesses are - locally connected, quirky and diverse. They are informal and often inefficient, but given the choice would you really want to replace them with the bland, sanitized efficiency of brands like Boots, WHSmith, Tescos and Primark? (click images to enlarge)

Casa De Pulpo

Pulpo bars are all over the city. Here is what I wrote in my notebook about the best one I found: 
‘Casa De Pulpo', up by the station. 8 Euros for a racion, a glass of Estrella Galicia and some bread. As far as I can see this place only sells pulpo (with or without potatoes), beer, coke, wine and bread. Eat the pulpo and dip your bread in the paprika and olive oil that is left over. Perfect! There is a scrubbed, worn wooden bar, benches and toothpicks to eat the pulpo with. It is 1pm on a Sat afternoon and at the end of the bar a group of fat old men in high waisted trousers order another round of pulpo and glasses of white wine with a smile. They seem to have had quite a few rounds already. The bar is run by a mum, and someone who looks like her mum, while a very dodgy looking bloke with slick black hair and a ponytail hangs around with a mate with a skinhead. The old men shout what seem like good natured insults at mr ponytail, and wink at the women, who do not seem best pleased with him’. 

Calle La Franje

In A Coruña, the place to eat seafood is on a buzzing little street called La Franja, more or less every restaurant here serves good seafood tapas. One Sunday afternoon I spent a very pleasant 3 hours in a bar called ‘Meson O Gallego’. Here is what I wrote in my notebook. ‘I ate in ‘Meson O Gallego’ because they had a menu you could point at. The waitresses looked like they had the hump, but the food looked great and it was rammed, so I waited for a table and sat down. As I suspected, service was very gruff, no niceties, point and pick, get your wine, get your bread and get on with it. I had scallops cooked with bacon, asparagus and prawns that were big, plump & sweet all of which was mopped up with some good rustic bread. After a couple of glasses of wine, I got talking to a young Spanish couple, who commented on me translating the menu with my phrase book and writing notes. They were from Salamanca, ‘the most attractive city in Spain’ apparently - could be a next trip (is their football team in LaLiga?) They took me through virtually the whole menu and recommended I round of my meal with some Orujo and after a couple of these I realized that the waitresses were not miserable after all and were actually very funny in a very dry, slightly scary, way'.

A Coruña

A Coruña is a busy port in Galicia, Northern Spain. The area has a landscape that looks very much like Cornwall and is rightly famed for it’s seafood. Most famously, Percebes (a goose neck barnacle that looks like a dinosaurs claw) and pulpo (octopus) served with potatoes on a wooden dish. It feels very far away from the metropolitan heart of Spain and so was great for hunting out the sorts of shops and businesses that COMPRA is designed to celebrate.

Deportiva La Coruna

In the summer of 2007 I visited A Coruña in Galicia for the next stage of my LaLiga inspired tour of Spain. Once more my choice of city was Arsenal related. Deportivo La Coruna had two memorable encounters with the gunners. Knocked out in the quarter finals of the UEFA cup in 1999/00 and revenge in 2001/2 by beating us home and away in the second round of the Champions League. Their stadium the ‘Riazor’ is situated 5 minutes from the beach!

Romania, India etc..

I believe a culture lives and breathes in it’s shops and marketplaces. So, on any trip abroad the first thing I do is go shopping. As a result I have an archive of drawings and photographs from trips to Romania, the Czech Republic, India and Mexico. There is also a project from the early nineties which consists of a series of paintings from photographs taken of a floating market in what was then Zaire. This work is the inspiration behind COMPRA. (click images to enlarge)