Raul is a highly visual person.  Coupled with the Argentine slant of ‘lo lindo,’ and a talent for interior design, he drew throughout our marriage and in many different styles. 

They go from the hyperrealist botanical pen and inks and the copies of the popular cartoonist Molina Campos (that he notes ‘This is not a Molina Campos’;) the caricatural portraits ranging from Yeltsin and Putin to Canada’s own foxy Pierre Elliott Trudeau; to tender graphites of his hands and ‘Cebollita’ the little girl he never had; to splotchy gestures I’ve called Los Negros/The Blacks; and the abstraction of ‘Elegant Line’ where less became more; to my favourites – the Fantasies and The Piguyo and Meta-tarpulo series which require a word or two of their own.

These make oblique reference to vulnerability, conflict and absurdity, folded into his beloved Argentine pampa with its massive sky, and the Paraná river. 

But who are the Piguyos and Meta-tarpulos? These were never explained though we would laugh over them. Did the piguyos come from the milk weeds he drew? A sort of buzzy irritating mosquito like intervention high in the sky? And the Met-tarpulos whatever their shape, which are always lumpen, absurd and/or pretentious.

All in all a universe to themselves.