Six degrees of separation from Hong Kong artist Alvin Wong

Alvin Wong Kai-chung’s sketches of Hong Kong are on display at the Urban Sketchers’ third-anniversary exhibition, which opened at the Fringe Club on Wednesday. An architect and interior designer, Wong never travels without a sketchbook, in which he draws the places he visits. He co-founded the Hong Kong branch of the Urban Sketchers, a group that has offshoots around the world. With the mission of “showing the world one drawing at a time”, the original Urban Sketchers was established in the United States, in 2007, by Gabriel Campanario …

The journalist and award-winning illustrator’s last name means “bell tower” in Spanish. Born in Barcelona in 1969, Campanario has been The Seattle Times’ news artist since 2006 and now calls the Pacific Northwest city home. In 2007, he started a Flickr page, then a group blog a year later, to promote the art of field sketching, starting a global movement. Campanario began his career in the early 1990s as an infographics artist at Barcelona newspaper La Vanguardia, one of the two main state papers in Spain during the dictatorship of General Franco …

Francisco Paulino Hermenegildo Teódulo Franco Bahamonde, as he was born, was the dictator of Spain for 36 years, from 1939 to 1975. He staged a coup in 1936 against the country’s newly elected democratic government, which led to a bloody civil war that lasted three years. His fascist regime was one of terror and oppression, with mass killings, torture and illegal detentions of political opponents the norm. Life in the early years of his regime is depicted in the 2006 film Pan’s Labyrinth, directed by Guillermo del Toro …