So long Nafplion and the fabulous Fougaru Arts Centre. Oh the drama of not noticing a low level water feature and wading to the cafe, as wet as a fish.
Hello Stemvitsa and wedding trucks.
And dancing brides.
From the coast to the mountains. Another fabulous day.
So far our road trip is mostly about walking the streets of Athens. 16,000 steps in 30 degree heat today. Starting with an early morning trip to an art supplies store to buy more watercolour paper but also because the owner makes his own artisanal wax pastels. His store was fabulous and his work station at the back of the store was a riot of colour.
Handmade oil pastels.
I’ve never used oil pastels but these were sorely tempting. For the sake of luggage I bought a small tube of watercolour named Olive just to celebrate its Greekness.
Getting to the store was a fabulous trip of street graffitti and a ridiculously named Vinyl and CD store.
My self-portrait was taken on a tree that had been painted blue and decorated with shards of broken mirrors.
Share a story about the furthest you’ve ever traveled from home.
Not a story about the furthest but a story about our current road trip before it even started. The only motorway that links us with our local airport was closed. An easy two hour journey became a tense four hour journey via A and B roads in Devon. Our flight was at 5:15 and we arrived at the airport at 5:05. Never were we so grateful for a delayed flight but regardless of the delay, check-in for luggage was very firmly closed. Thankfully we met some fabulous people and we were processed with kindness and expediency.
We arrived at 2 am and can reveal the start of our roadtrip.
Our first day was an odysea of coffee shops and nattering and a museum of Greek culture where I met this splendid fellow.
Goodness how I love this face painted in about 1870. A face so full of mischief I would be drawn to him at a party.
Has he just eaten the last pie?
Or farted?
Has he just heard the most salacious and delicious piece of gossip?
Is he trying really hard not to giggle?
I have no idea but he has brightened my first day in Athens. I will take his unusual portrait image with me on my road trip.
And this fabulous abstract created in a Sephora beauty product shop. Just nearby to our Airbnb.
Last night we went to see an art exhibition featuring the work of one of our bobbing friends.
She has been doing her Masters in Illustration.
We really loved her work.
But it is hard to show in a 2D format. Bobbers have played their part in her research, we sniffed our way through the olfactory part of her final project when we were very cold and damp. Glad to see our hard work paid off.
Another aspect that is impossible to share in this format. Regardless we are very proud of her and so happy to be able to give her a gentle squeeze. The poor woman has been acutely ill this week.
Not remotely linked to art, it is bobbing and Covid-19 that delivered her to us as a friend. As we walked around to look at other students work it was surprising how many people we recognised from other sea swimming or paddle boarding groups that use the Stonehouse swimming beaches.
Small worlds that collide.
All work © Debra Parkinson. Link below to artist information.
Are you seeking security or adventure?
This blog is supposed to be about me finishing a watercolour after four months. But then my blog host put this teasing question on my admin page . I can answer the question with this painting. After four months of doodling I thought I was done. You could say, I was secure that enough was enough. But the minute the finished photograph was taken I knew that security was never going to work for this string bag of windfall apples. The leaves are not bold enough, the leaves are going on an adventure. The leaves are going bolder. Flakes of gold leaf are going to make the leaves sparkle.
There was never a plan to paint windfall apples in a string bag. I just wanted something to paint in a meditative way while talking at an artists social gathering.
First coloured orbs appeared.
Then the string bag.
The arrival of the string bag somehow turned the orbs into bruised and imperfect apples.
And that should have been that, but the leaves are all wrong so the August gathering of art natterers will see me possibly adventuring too far with this picture. It could go well . It may not.
In my search for creative adventure I could be…
Gilding the Lily.
Saturday pondering, it is often a surprise to me how a blog will end and sometimes even the beginning takes me unawares.
During my morning dog walk I popped into an exhibition at Royal William Yard (RWY). It is Shark Month at Ocean Studios. There are loads of lovely Sharky images, but on a bright morning this one was the only one not glazed and not suffering from loads of reflections. The website of the artist is below.
In the cafe there was also a really cute collection of bits and pieces left at low tide near to RWY.
I particularly liked these little bits with text on.
As I regularly poke about at low tide I was quite jealous, I never find anything with words on.
But then on my walk home I had a moment!
The tide had delivered me a cracked and grubby plectrum. With words on it.
A freebie advertising gears for Mountain bikes.
Here’s the moral dilemma of the day. Do I donate to the communal exhibition of tidal finds? Or does a grubby plectrum start my own collection of mudlarking treasures with text on.?
Me and a shark with beady eyes. One more hazardous than the other.
I have completely failed to mention my Kindle book reading. Which this year is my non-fiction holiday read. I am a good deal further into it than this picture suggests. I had excellent history teachers at my school and wish I could have studied it beyond O level but I wish that about lots of subjects. I have never wished for different History teachers until now. Shalina Patel serves up history so intriguingly she would most certainly get an apple from me everyday.
The Hotel Shelf book has been chosen. It will almost certainly be the flight home book.
I picked up a fabulous life quote from my current read, soon to be set free to roam wherever with all the other Hotel shelf paperbacks the world over.
” We can’t all live in perfect harmony with our integrity “
I will be taking that sentence home with me.
Necessity is the mother or father of invention. Overnight I remembered my dad sharpening pencils with glass paper ( sandpaper) . An Emery board has done a very good job. No pencil crisis any more.
In hotel bookshelf faux science I would say that the majority of guests here are German and they read a better standard of books than the British guests. There are some shockingly bad cover art examples in either language. Predominantly ‘Romance’ novels that my mother was very dismissive of when I was younger. She called them pulpy kidney books, as if describing some terrible medical malady that would befall anyone reading such stuff. Not for her and her second wave feminist friends, except…
When it was time to clear my parents home following their deaths I found a surprise stash of exactly that type of novel in the back of her wardrobe. She didn’t sink to Mills and Boon but the subject matter was predominantly historical and medical romance.
At death her kidneys were in fine form so maybe she never crossed a line or maybe she imagined pulpy kidneys.
Book 4 of the holiday reading pile includes a lot of rape. Hardly surprising as the core of the narrative is the Japanese invasion of Hong Kong during World War 2. In this book , so far , none of the main characters are involved. The brutality of the Japanese Occupation is the background to the narrative. I can revel in knowing the location well and slotting history into well-known locations is always fascinating.
In other news two new-to -me, Greek words have cropped up this week . Thanks to my fellow bookworms.
It was too tempting not to include a book and buttocks in a beach sketch . Surrounded, as I am, by buttocks both beautiful and not.
All that buttock sketching has revealed an error on my packing. No pencil sharpener!!
The second word is Ekphrasis.
Vivid description, oh how I wish I had the words. I may no longer have a useful pencil but I do still have my paints and a camera to enable a vivid end to the holiday.
The first book from the hotel shelf has been picked up, lets see how that goes.
I don’t paint people much, which is strange as I find people fascinating. I don’t think I have any more planned exhibitions for 2024, so I could set myself a summer project. The few people I can pull out of the digital or even real-world portfolio are all thinking about something.
Maybe that is my thing, I hadn’t realised. Even a pair of dancers are not truly engaged with one another or the viewer. Lost in their individual worlds despite being physically dependent on one another.
Even my recent cold water swimmer is lost within the tiles of the shower.
The more I look the more pensive people I find. Storm Agnes, raging but full of thought.
There is even a portrait of me in our hallway , pondering.
Seems that pondering is a creative theme. I had no idea!
P s In the interests of research I went in search of a painting that has been stored here for many years.
My first portrait from my Foundation degree, hiding in lofts, attics and barns for 25 years or so.
In one of life’s uncanny twists, I discovered recently that my DNA is 10% Viking. But that is not particularly important to this ponder. I seem to have always liked people in my paintings to be deep in thought. A point worth pondering I think
Hyperlocal Procrastination Day.
You would think a day of painting, that I had planned and looked forward to, would be made even more possible by another day of disgusting weather.
But then the ‘ tasks’ seduced me, and before paint could be laid on paper I started a minor tidy up which led to a major tidy up of the art cupboard.
Which led to 2 hours of trying to coax a dead printer back to life. Unsuccessfully. Which led to me losing my phone , in the spice drawer of all places . Found after 2 hours of maniacal back tracking with false memories of when I last used it. Consequently not a drop of paint touched paper yesterday.
But on a positive, the black tulips look wonderful in the rain and the art cupboard is fabulous. The printer remains deceased.
Coincidentally I dressed today in homage to a black tulip. Art bag and DM’s feeling the tulip love.
theoldmortuary.design 