The sketches below are taken from the project Subway Life by Antonio Jorge Goncalves, a project that led the artist to draw people sitting in metro carriages in ten cities, on five continents.
It all started in London with an exercise that consisted of drawing the person who sat in front of you on the Metro. It was a random method of choosing models that was intended to force him to draw what he could not choose. Upon returning to Lisbon, he decided to extend the game to nine other cities: Lisbon, Berlin, Stockholm, New York, São Paulo, Tokyo, Athens, Moscow, and Cairo.
Eight hundred hours of work later, he discovered that among the more than three thousand drawings recorded in his notebooks, repetition of postures was rare. Although his subjects were in the same situation (sitting on an underground train), their individuality always stood out in their hand position or in the way they crossed their legs. And if, on the one hand, you could find stereotypes of the inhabitants of each of the cities, on the other, there were also individuals who could fit into any of them.
You can see more of his fine and fun work on his website.
