Babies and more Babies

 I didn't expect this day to have anything to do with babies.  Bear with me here.

Loule is an inland town about 40 minutes from me that's known for its Saturday market.  It has a beautiful historic market building with an Arab-influenced design and locals shop there for fish, produce and spices.  The market spills onto the streets and even on a somewhat cool and windy morning, people are pulling their shopping carts to the market to stock up.  Masked in my N95, I figured I could head to the market and steer clear of crowds.  And that was very nice (everyone else was masked too).

The nearby shopping streets are lined with stores selling leather goods, many many shoe stores, kitchen items, clothing, pottery and a fair amount of pastry.  The sidewalks are tiled with beautiful patterns.

As I was headed to tour the castle (not to minimize it -- the castle was really interesting and the history going back to days of the Moors up through Christianity was fascinating) and its archeological museum, I walked by a very small church with the door open.  And this tiny little church, Nossa Sra Da Conceicao, which had bench seating for maybe 20 people, was amazing.  Built in the 1600's and restored in 2007, it has a very elaborate gorgeous altarpiece with many babies.   Baby faces, babies holding up columns, babies everywhere.  And the walls were tiled with the story of Mary's life; including baby Jesus being circumcised (it's in the mid-upper right quartile of the photo I took below).

I spent as long in that tiny church as I did anywhere else today.  There wasn't an inch that wasn't either painted, carved or tiled and the stories told in the tiles were beautifully painted.  

And then in a shop window in a nearby block, I saw this.  It just seemed like a lot of babies to me.

I finished my day inside, too windy to paint outside.  I'm working on a street scene that was near the Chapel of Bones.  This is on that prepared yupo paper, and you can see the under-color peeking through,  Not done, but coming along.    You can see the direction of every paint stroke on yupo paper, and I need to do some thinking about mark making to be more intentional about those paint strokes.  Another day.