Gabriel Garcia Marquez 1927 – 2014. The brilliant South American writer has died. This was my first portrait commissioned when I left college in 1986. I was asked by publishers Jonathan Cape to produce a portrait of the Columbian writer. It’s a little conservative and hardly my best work. In one of my roughs, I had him dressed as a fish. Yikes ! But I got to become a lifelong Marquez fan. Love in the Time of Cholera – this is an opening line of pure genius –

“It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love”