vespa-scooter.jpg (2013) Painting by Gideon Nel

Another quite day in a Portuguese village, located on top of a mountain overlooking the border with Spain this quaint cobblestoned 14 or 15th-century village host the venue to display and advertise my VESPA SCOOTER. The actors are all real, and the scene is very typical the environment. From the left a young man starring at the scooter, his thoughts of escaping this slow pace of the village for something more exciting, the dog, there is always a dog laying about like every other day. The three girls at the bus stop, waiting for their once a day bus to arrive. In the distance behind them, it can be spotted. The lady inspecting her flowers is a heavily jewelled spinsters, who dresses up daily but goes nowhere .She is a central figure in the village as she is on all the councils and committees and nothing in this village happens without her having something to do with it. The two tourists are drinking beer and behaving as they do, in love in public to the scowling stare from the old lady passing by with her vegetable shopping. Shirt open and behaving in a relaxed and free spirit as the place allows. The estate agent and his client behind the old lady are striding through the village to see the next wonderful cottage for a weekend getaway. The badly parked caravan selling “pregos" a piece of veal slapped into a fresh bun, and beer to tourists is on a concession to help with the overflow of tourists, but only locals buy from him, as we see a pot bellied worker stopping off for his mid-morning shot and beer.
Parked in a proud position is the hero, the VESPA SCOOTER. This scooter offers all the possibilities to most of the people around, low running costs, good looking and most importantly LIBERTY.
Colorful, quite and typically Portuguese.
It would be amiss not to mention the hydrangeas in the foreground. They seem to flourish in Portugal and always make a lovely display.
This painting started out as a line drawing, pen and Indian ink on canvas in 1993/4 and was nearly complete but never seemed to “work” for me, then in 2013 I as I was doing the first in the series of product paintings I revisited this canvas. In fact, there were two canvases with large ink drawings on them, the other was RED STAR COFFEE. SO I started adding color, in areas the ink lines are still visible, but once I started painting it was not a priority to show the ink lines, I mere used the subject matter to complete the painting. The paving stones called calçada is typical paving used in Portugal and are normally made from marble.

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