Algarve – Artistic Impressions is a beautiful “coffee-table” book that describes the author’s impressions of Algarve in the late 1970s and early 1980s – shortly after the fall of Salazar’s dictatorship and before mass tourism changed it for ever. The book is illustrated by the author’s prize-winning watercolour paintings, which depict environments that are mostly lost in the modernisation of Algarve that has taken part in the last 30 years.

Additional black & white vintage photographs also show Algarve in the beginning of the 20th century.

NEW: Learn watercolour painting directly from Daniel Hasselmyr!
Please see all the details at www.algarve-art-seminar.com

Quote from the back cover of the book:

“ALGARVE – ARTISTICALLY CAUGHT IN THE 70s

Algarve has seen a huge change since the Portuguese revolution on 25th April 1974. Daniel Hasselmyr, a prize winning international artist, has lived in Algarve since the late 1970s and has been hugely inspired by the old fashioned country and its people. The paintings in this book capture Algarve as it was in the years before mass tourism and EU membership changed it for ever. This was a period when local people produced goods mainly for local consumption. The main industries were fishing, agriculture, building and handicraft. Furniture was made, baskets woven, oranges harvested and wine produced. Fish was caught, tiles made and houses built and designed by the people themselves. Cork, carob, sardines and port wine were successfully exported.

The national pride, reflected in their honest catholic lives, had survived Salazar's dictatorship: the citizens were always well dressed in spite of widespread poverty and the houses richly decorated in spite of lacking funds for maintenance. What Hasselmyr found was a naïve, laid back life style with lovely picturesque streets, cafes and dilapidated buildings . For Hasselmyr as an artist, it for ever changed the way he worked, in that he developed a new, contemporary style of water colour painting that he found utterly suitable to depict this place where time seemed to had stood still. An artistic documentation of a Portugal that has now mostly disappeared, was the result!”