I recently made a short “business” trip to Milano, city which in the past I had only bypassed on the way to other north Italian cities. Milano shows its past and present power pretty much everywhere, starting with a robust and dominant architecture.

My business consisted on selecting and buying five to six cuts of suit fabric for the next characters in “The Boardroom”, the last and remaining part of the APEX series. As charming as Dublin can be, this sort of fabric simply can’t be found here… so I reverted to the fashion factory itself: distances in Europe are short!

My Dublin Italian connections tipped me off in advance, and I went straight to a spot where great fabrics were offered “scampoli” – at an affordable price (a tenth of the retail cost). These are cuts which wouldn’t be enough to make a suit (I learned that at least you need 6 meters for one suit) but were perfect for my new set of “canvases”.

The selected shop, “Il Vecchio Drappiere”, was everything I wished for. A Milanese family business solely dedicated to sell the best quality suit fabrics with hundreds of patterns and textures to choose from, and all the time in the world to do so. What’s best, it’s location in Via Meravigli made obvious a visit to Santa Maria Delle Grazie, to admire the restored “Last Supper” by Leonardo.

Hopefully this background story will further enrich this series of paintings about the power driven specimen among us, everyday humans.