There's a kind of war between script and image, a struggle for dominance. In Painted Steps, I want the images to win.
As I'm working on the truck image, I'm thinking about the source photo, wondering about the words on the side of the truck. From the beginning of Painted Steps I've kept choosing not to use text, not to paint words. I considered labeling the little pictures, and decided against it. Somehow using words feels like cheating. Would I be using text to cover for a failure in image making?
I penciled in place names along the striped elevation band, but reluctantly, and only for strategic reasons. They're discrete and graphically unobtrusive.

I may seem contrary. Painted Steps is a kind of ‘map’ but I don’t want it to have words.
 
On the other hand, the crescendo-like perspective, of the lettering could enhance the sense of drama, size and speed of the truck. Also, the words are in the photo, a real part of the truck. Without the words it looks a little blank, as if it was carrying a secret but somewhat bland cargo.

So, I will try. I'll practice the lettering with a study on a separate piece of paper. I feel intimidated. I feel I don't know how to do it. How do you 'paint' letters. Isn't this writing? I try painting the individual letters in tiny strokes with my finest brush and using my magnifier.
 
Actually I never believe I'm capable of successfully painting any of the little pictures. As we found on the Camino, not knowing exactly where you're going can be exciting and adventurous. Sometimes however, the uncertainty borders on fear and self-doubt, a place where I often find myself stuck.
To avoid this place of stasis, I set up a kind of  "suspension of disbelief", I act as if I am capable.  I use a timer to create a bubble of safety - boundaries of 30 minutes. I try to keep on this side of belief, working in patience until the image unfolds into a Real-ism. The feelings transform into awe when the image reveals itself and becomes clear and satisfying.

Even if it's a bit clumsy the lettering enhances the drama. I'm pleased. I paint it into the truck picture on Painted Steps.

Even if it's a bit clumsy the lettering enhances the drama. I'm pleased. I paint it into the truck picture on Painted Steps.

Some time after I finish the truck image I take another look. Now that all my labour and struggle is forgotten I reassess. The lettering is still not quite right. My problem, I think, is the words I've been using to think about the lettering problem.
 I can't paint text, that's lettering or calligraphy and I'm not good with lettering. But when I think of it as an image of signage, in pictorial terms, my job as a painter becomes clear, and I know what I need to do.
 One of the basic methods for creating the illusion of space is gradation and contrast of colour intensity. Generally, close up is sharp, bright, intense colour. Distance is suggested by fading away to softer paler tones. So, I pale out the letters F and L because they are smaller and farther away and sharpen and brighten up the letters L, L, and A. Better.

The image stands out in Painted Steps because of the words. You can read the side of the truck as well as "read" the image.
 Despite all the attention on detail and accuracy, I don’t intend Painted Steps as a bulletin board of information; I want to offer a sequence of experience. I'm hoping to make powerful images, lingering potent images, giving life to illusion; illusion as a doorway to remembered and desired experience. Not symbolic. Simply there.
 
And without the mediation of words.

I am a compulsive reader. For me being literate means it's simpler to read words than to 'decode' images. The words are a mediation, they choose and isolate a particular aspect of the world. Words speak. Images are silent.
 
In 'My name is Red', Orhan Pamuk tells of a battle for truth and authority between script and image. In Islamic Persian script-based culture, painted Miniatures are meant to act only as aids to the story, to illuminate the story, not exist as acts of creation in themselves.
I want exactly the opposite. I want the images to be 'creation'.
 
Both before and during my Camino walk I decided that the experience would not be mediated by 'scriptures'. I made a point of not reading the current Camino guidebooks. I resisted being told what to notice.
 
And yet, I find myself compelled to write about making the painting, the 'guide book', to the parallel journey. So, despite the strain of switching from the act of writing to the act of painting I keep lurching ahead, keeping on the move!

Eight hundred and forty two words! And a picture....
"A drawing is simply a line going for a long walk."
 
Buen Camino!

The pathway of the Camino Francés was paced out by the feet of humans and beasts. The N120 highway follows the same geography, following the path of least resistance. We often saw it running parallel, at some distance to the foot-path.
 
Except in Villafranca Montes de Oca.  Here the Camino, the highway, and Main Street converge. In this medieval village, the highway blasts right through.
We were among the hungry pilgrims hovering on the doorstep of the village supermercado, anxious for the 5 o'clock re-opening, with 18-wheelers and refrigerated semis barrelling past, practically scraping the doorway of the little store against which we all flattened ourselves. I wonder what it's like to live there with the village split in two.

We stayed that night in a habitación at the El Pájaro just off the highway. The next morning, after breakfast and a chat with a pilgrim couple from Holland, we hoisted on our backpacks and began our day's walk. I stopped a few minutes to take some photos of the early morning stream of trucks.
 
Back home in my studio I knew an image of a truck had to be part of my piece.
Sifting through my Camino snaps I found a great truck photo but it was missing its back end. I had shot it out of frame. I started hunting the web for a picture of a truck with a compatible back-end that I could patch on.  I also needed to pinpoint the placement of the truck on Painted Steps. Using the elevation profile in the striped band I plotted the location of Montes de Oca, a little over half way through our journey, right on the edge of the second (left hand) sheet.
 
And it struck me!  The 'endless' truck problem had created a perfect rationale for the diptych format. I hadn't been sure about using two separate sheets of paper as the substrate for the painting. I might have, perhaps, wanted one long sheet. But I liked the colour, absorbency and texture of the Somerset and the pieces together made a satisfyingly elongated rectangle. Now I could see the diptych form was exactly right, how the split space between the 2 sheets would serve to heighten the 'barrelling out of nowhere' experience of the truck.
I now needed a truck image with no back-end.
I now needed 2 sheets.
Two wrongs sometimes make a right!

Among my 'rules of engagement' defining the figure /ground relationships in Painted Steps  is a decision to not put the little pictures in capsules or bubbles, not to paint "vignettes'. I want my images to sit plainly on the 'ground'. The middle band of Painted Steps is the land.
 But I don't need to be rigid about the rules, just respectful. The truck will need a road, some landscape around it to show the action as well as the object, the heavy truck barrelling towards a sharp curve.
 Gradually I've moved forward, painting in the scene; a bit of tarmac, a white line, more grey tarmac curving up the hill, more descriptive white lines, more hill with bushes, trees, signage, bit by bit, trying to keep on this side of just-enough.

The image begins fairly flat against the frontal plane. Then the added angles, overlap and perspective create the illusion of 3-D space and depict the truck driving into the painting.
 
The truck is a complex object, with the rounded hollow cab, the huge hard-edge box and the doughnut rounds of multiple wheels. The British term  articulated lorry expresses the complexity well. The object is also in extreme perspective... difficult. Painting and re-painting has taken a lot of time.

I go back to the source photo. Does my painting need the crash barrier to prove the sharpness of the curve? I resist, then paint it in. Does it need the rooftop to show the narrowness of the highway? I paint the rooftop into the study, find it works, then add it into Painted Steps.

Does it need the rooftop to show the narrowness of the highway?

Is clarity more important than rules? Is purity?

Pictorially in Painted Steps I am working with the cardinal points North South East West,
top, bottom, right, left. I want to create the sense of westward movement from right to left, mirroring the westward journey of the Camino Francés.
 
To achieve this I've had to flip some of the source photos to get the desired orientation. In the photo of the truck it was already facing the right direction, ready to paint from. But once painted into Painted Steps the geographical truth and the pictorial truth contradict each other. Anyone familiar with that landscape would know the truck is 'really' headed back towards Belorado not west to Santiago.

But it looks right for Painted Steps. Here, to me, is another aspect of 'mediation' from experience to picture, fictionalizing the truth to reveal a truth.

The beautiful Somerset paper of Painted Steps has had its own journey from east to west. Milled in England, shipped to Montreal, trucked across Canada and ferried to Victoria, it lay on my shelves for 35 years, waiting for the right moment.

Buen Camino!

Finding the ‘good enough’ place is difficult in this type of work. It’s never ending! In a way, it’s all failure …”walking, falling, and stopping oneself from falling….
I’m tired!
Just in time, by chance, I found, literally on my doorstep, some encouragement.
I was leaving work for the day when I found a paperback propped up on the outside stairs outside my studio. It turned out to be  “My name is Red” by the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk.
 “My name is Red” is a murder mystery set in Istanbul in 1591. Its main characters are a group of illustrators illuminators, working in the context of the illustrious tradition of Islamic Book Arts, and obsessed with art making: technically, materially, philosophically, spiritually, economically and politically.
 
Perfect! Shop Talk. - life and death discussion around the concept of Realism in art.
 
“Allah created this earthly realm so that, above all, it might be seen. Afterwards, He provides us with words so we might share and discuss with one another what we’ve seen.
We mistakenly assumed that these stories arose out of words and that illustrations were painted in service of these stories.
Quite to the contrary, painting is the act of seeking out Allah’s memories and seeing the world as He see the world.” from My Name is Red

This is a kind of ‘Realism”. It’s from a point of view, a ‘POV’, that’s literally (mythological speaking) an aerial perspective.
 
Myself, as a child, I grew up believing the idea of a painting as a window- a window anyone can look through and see a real world; logical, common-place and idiosyncratic. So, the Old Masters of Christian Renaissance, painted the real world, made real art. Even if with imaginary characters.)
As I grew older, under the influence of LIFE magazine or in my case, National Geographic (both USA artifacts!), Photography became the arbiter of the real.
Then we learned that a photo could lie- à la cold war Soviet Revisionism - with bleach and cotton-wool -  the record of a person’s existence could be erased.
 The screen, internet, facts, news, SciFi, drama, stories as news, news as stories….
We still believe the picture as a window into the real world, ….we just don’t trust it.
 
So let's say Painted Steps is not a picture or a painting.

I‘ll call it a map, and go for a walk with a line.
 
Buen Camino!

"How ‘long ago and far away’…is enough?"  or  "A walk in the park meets the backstory".

My next little picture is The Barn. I had seen a few buildings of this type in Tierra de Campos. They were off in the distance, far from the walking path, seemingly isolated in the middle of fields, and not easy not to notice. It took me a while to figure them out. All that pork and no pigs…?
Distance functions here like the thick fringe of trees along BC highways that mask the blight of clear-cut. This is not the chickens-scratching-in-the-dirt kind of farming.
Distance means too far to hear, too far to smell. 
Distance allows us to ‘distance’ ourselves….
 
However, the tele-photo lens offers a kind of transport, can ‘virtually’ carry you closer. So can a magnifying glass, a finger spread or command +. So I chose to paint the barn quite tiny. An individual background brush stroke becomes a little hill.

How far is far?
 
To get to the Camino, to get to the start of our pilgrimage, we flew 8,000k from the Pacific coast, across Canada, Greenland, the Atlantic Ocean, to Roissy CDG. We crossed Paris on the RER and Metro, 24 k to the Gare St Lazare, then travelled 770k southwest by train to Bayonne on the coast.
An hour’s bus ride, 53k, down a winding country road, took me, my partner and 50 other back-packing, pole-carrying, broad brimmed prospective ‘pilgrims’’ into the spring green heart of Basque country.
We finally arrived at the terminus in Donibane Garazi, St.Jean Pied-de-Port, the starting point of the Camino Francés. My destination that night was the Hotel Camou which according to Google maps was in the neighbouring town Uharte Cize about 700m away.
Maybe take a taxi?

“Is it far?” I asked our taxi driver.
He smiled, laughed, and said <ça dépend.>
 
(To paraphrase Obélix “Ils sont fous, ces touristes”).
 
Perhaps it was the preponderance of x’s in written Basque, “Euskari”, that made me connect Basque with the story of Astérix and Obélix.
Perhaps Welsh being also a ‘unique’ language, and the Welsh being Celts, with a reputation of people resistant to Romanization, Latinization,   There emerges a kind of  Xena -fication of history, a mythological, anecdotal, orally transmitted soup. A connection of time, not place. Like some vague family history.
 
But in reality it’s possible that the Basque are ancestors of the Welsh.During the last Ice Age this region, Navarre, was habitable, free of glaciers.
At the retreat of the ice the population of this area spread north and so ‘the Basque Refuge”, may be understood to be the cradle of European peoples, making the Basque ancestors to the British!
And in fact it may be that the famous Celt village of Asterix, so French a cultural artefact, may well be proven to have been in Spain, or more precisely, in Basque country.
 
All may not be as it appears.
 
Happy Trails,
Buen Camino!

Alvaro Bermeio
https://www.courrierinternational.com/article/1999/12/23/et-si-asterix-etait-basque
Forty years after its creation, the work of Goscinny and Uderzo seems to reach the pantheon of the great myths of our time with the film “Asterix and Obelix against Caesar”, currently on Spanish screens. Everything seems French to the extreme in this blockbuster.
 
With one exception: if, taking into account History, we move from fiction to reality, instead of being in Gaul, the legendary village resistant to the invader should rather be in Spain. And, more precisely, in our ineffable Basque Country. History says that after the defeat of Vercingetorix all Gaul submitted to Julius Caesar. However, in Hispania……….. Alvaro Bermeio
 
Courrier International 15/12 2004
Quarante ans après sa création, l’oeuvre de Goscinny et Uderzo semble accéder au panthéon des grands mythes de notre époque avec le film Astérix et Obélix contre César, actuellement sur les écrans espagnols. Tout semble français à l’extrême dans cette superproduction.
 
A une exception près: si, en tenant compte de l’Histoire, on passe de la fiction à la réalité, au lieu d’être en Gaule, le village légendaire résistant à l’envahisseur devrait plutôt se trouver en Espagne. Et, plus précisément, dans notre ineffable Pays basque. L’Histoire dit qu’après la défaite de Vercingétorix toute la Gaule s’est soumise à Jules César. Or, en Hispanie…..

Basque Refuge:
https://indo-european.eu/2017/07/neolithic-and-bronze-age-basque-speaking-iberians-resisted-invaders-from-the-steppe/
,
Xena Warrior Princess – TV, New Zealand
          (facts = data = writing)
 

Looking towards Santiago -‘west’ on Painted Steps- the next little picture I painted is The Wild Boar / El Jabalí.

Leaving Carrión De Los Condes (before the pueblo of Moratinos), the main route looked quite flat. It was bone straight, and edged the highway. So, encouraged by our Camino friend Terry (who was walking for the 2nd or third time.) we took the alternative route or ‘variante balise’ as it was marked in our guide book “Miam-Miam DoDo”.
The path led us up into a rolling landscape of tilled fields between scrub tree hills. We didn’t mind that it was uphill and a little farther. We were in good shape.
Throughout that section of the land we saw only two people, one driving a tractor, the other hoeing a field. We waved and yelled Hola! He seemed glad, waved and called back.
 
Terry had walked on down round the next curve. I looked ahead into a field of ripening grain, saw a dark shape standing stalk still. An animal cut-out? a buffalo, a baby moose?
 
It caught scent or sight of us, instantly turned and bounded off up the scrub-covered hillside bordering the field.  A wild boar, the sanglier of Asterix & Obelix fame! It dodged through tufts of thicket to emerge and bound along the crest of the hill in perfect silhouette. Powerful, fast, beautiful.
A perfect birthday gift for my partner. A reward for literally 'taking the road less traveled’.

We were so pleased! I didn’t get a photo, it happened so fast. So for Painted Steps I looked for pictures on the internet.
I was taken aback to discover that boars are often considered either as pest animals, or as big game. They are pictured as infesting human space, like the deer in nature-loving Victoria, raccoons in Montreal, or foxes in other towns & cities. Or, they are chased, cornered with trucks and dogs to harass them into vicious dangerous beasts, worthy challenges to mighty hunters. (I recall the ‘Order of the Boar’ from Heinrich Boll’s Billiards at half-past Nine. The meaning is retroactively resonant.)

Apparently boars occasionally wander into the suburbs of Madrid. The problem of the wild boar’s loss of natural habitat and interface with humans is augmented by the creation of feral hogs, farmed pigs abandoned into the ‘wild’ by industries finding them not profitable.

I also found a picture of a boar sow crossing a dirt road with a string of furry, striped piglets trotting behind in single file like ducklings!
And I did find some photos that reflected the boar of my experience. I painted 3 boar pictures but hopefully in a way that suggests they are three positions of one creature in movement.

Or so I thought!
Since then, in a casual way I’m adding to his length to his legs peaking through the grass- the longer grass.
I went back to the photos and yes I’ve painted it only up to his elbows. His legs are really longer. Perhaps one of the reasons he reminded me of a baby moose is that when I saw the moose he was sunk deep in the snow.

Connections!
Hi Sandy, Hi Denny, thanks for the moose!

Happy Trails
&
Buen Camino

While walking the Camino I had to stop myself thinking about getting to the end or only my feet would have arrived in Santiago. Why be in a hurry? One step at a time, enjoy, be involved. Making Painted Steps poses a similar challenge. I get anxious about finishing, impatient to see all the elements in place, and all the interactions of the elements. It’s taking a long time…
 
How far...
is a long time?

After the Goya ‘side-trip’, I’m glad to be back to the little pictures of Painted Steps, to be back on the road’. It’s like on the Camino. Every morning; wake up, get dressed, packed, and walk off and feeling just plain pleased to be walking again. Before 8am!  Amazing!.........

This is the road ahead, from the dovecotes of Villalcázar de Sirga to the swinerys  of Tierra de Campos  with wild boar in between.

The image of a dovecote quickly came to mind as a picture choice for Painted Steps. But on the Camino it took a while to come into focus.
We were walking through the northern tip of Tierra de Campos, land of farms and fields. For days, I had been hearing the soft cooing of doves. I began to notice some odd shapes among the farm out buildings. The strangely proportioned structures were windowless, round or square, often with fancy crenellations, or other decorative flourishes.
 Finally in the town of Villalcázar de Sirga we came upon a similar structure in the grounds of a popular restaurant. This structure had been restored and was open as an interpretative center. It was a Palomar, a Dovecote.
I learned that the husbandry of doves/pigeons is a European tradition going back to medieval times and was widely promoted in Palencia in the 1800’s. Pigeons /doves were raised for their eggs, meat and feathers and their guano, bird-dropping fertilizer.
This Villalcázar Palomar is a classic of the region, round and 2- tiered with a ceramic tiled roof. The walls are plastered and white-washed adobe. Beautiful!  Inside, there is an inner circular courtyard. You can see the roof structure, wood beams fanned like the underside of an umbrella. Fashioned into all the walls are rows and rows of niches, hundreds of nesting places for the wild palomas, the doves.

 The dove is a potent cultural symbol. Maybe the dovecote is traditionally a place for lovers’ trysts, part of the association of dove with love. In Michael Ondaatje’s novel the  “English Patient’ the nurse’s father dies hidden and alone in a dovecote. On the Camino we frequently saw this symbol for the Christian Roman Catholic idea of Holy Spirit. I would imagine that Lorca’s poetic image of the “bosque de palomas desecadas’ (the thicket of dried up doves) “resonates deeply into the Spanish cultural religious political psyche.
I will have the dove in Painted Steps.

We saw lots of adobe building in Palencia: heaps of straw, clay and sand on plastic sheets, ready to repair walls in towns and villages: work in progress.
Historically, building with such a malleable ‘user friendly’ material would allow each farm family to customize their palomar according to need and resources and individual taste in decoration.
According to an article in the local Sahagún (online) newspaper there is currently an effort to preserve and honour these unique and fanciful buildings.
 Local? It’s all relative. Sahagún was 3 days ahead of us!
For Painted Steps I resisted the classic beauty of this restored palomar and painted a more modest one that I had photographed in-situ, on a farm far from the path, and without telephoto lens. Only when I spread/enlarged the image for the preliminary study did I discover its beauty, and that this one was oval, not round.

The bright June sun making strong shadow gives it a solid 3-d presence and evokes a living landscape in the picture’s background.

Multiple Points of view. If you see the painting it in real – live -- you might have to get in close with a magnifier to get the full impact of the picture.

It’s been interesting figuring out how best to show what I’ve been painting. If you’re looking at this on a phone, a medium distance Hi Res photo is all you need. You can spread/enlarge along an infinite gradient, ‘to taste’ for your eyes. If it’s printed on paper or shown on a fixed screen I need to choose and present multiple photographs showing a selection of distances, enlargements, crops.
 
It demands becoming more alert to the demands and opportunities of different forms of mediation.(ie medium/message)
Which device is the mediator of your experience?
What would be a ‘true photo’?
Does this offer different points of view or simply variety?
Who said every picture needs a thousand words?

So many questions…
Step back. One step at a time. Ok.
...Walking and falling and catching yourself from falling………

Buen Camino!

adendum

X  el Centro de Interpretación del Palomar en Villalcázar de Sirga. http://www.palomardelcamino.com/
 
* Laurie Anderson *
 
“I wanted you. And I was looking for you
But I couldn't find you
I wanted you. And I was looking for you all day
But I couldn't find you. I couldn't find you

You're walking. And you don't always realize it
But you're always falling
With each step, you fall forward slightly
And then catch yourself from falling
Over and over, you're falling
And then catching yourself from falling
And this is how you can be walking and falling
At the same time”

Failure is a useful benchmark. In my copy of Visíon Fantástica I am pleased with the beauty of the colour but I was not able to capture the ethereal quality of Goya’s mountain.

This failure points out how subtle differences can affect the reading of a painting. In Goya’s Visíon, the mountain is a metaphor of hopefulness, more poignant. The man points, but it is pointless…

It is said that this mountain or butte refers to Gibraltar. Gibraltar; aka ‘The Rock’, the gateway into the Mediterranean, the threshold out, the Pillars of Hercules, the stepping stone between Europe and Africa. It marks a direction of possible escape off the Iberian Peninsula into Africa for those fleeing anti Semitism (a major ‘pogrom’ in 1350) as well as the 1492 expulsion of Muslim Iberians.
The Umayyad Caliphate gave it its present name from the Arabic, Jebel Tariq.

I get a picture of the ‘multi-culturalism’ of the peninsula as a whole in this reference to Goya’s town Zaragoza, which according to Enrique Cock, a 16th century Dutch Catholic historian exiled to Spain, was at one point inhabited fully by Moriscos. He wrote, "(They) would rather go on a pilgrimage to Mecca than Santiago de Compostela" http://www.proyectos.cchs.csic.es/humanismoyhumanistas/enrique-cock

There is a ‘classical ’ Olympian look to the city on the Mountain. Perhaps the city is an incarnation of the classical ideal, a pinnacle of rational living, peace, and beauty. Perhaps this is the “reason” referred to by Goya’s title for his etching “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters” (El sueño de la razón produce monstruos)(1798).

A third element in Visíon Fantástica is the long line of people on the move coming from as far as the eye can see. It’s the typical trail of fleeing populations, a straggle of men and women, on foot, on horseback, carrying bundles of all kinds.
The armed horsemen at the head of the line seem unsure of which direction to take. At the center foreground is the crossroads. Will they lead the way up the mountain road?

The right hand corner of the painting holds the fourth element that seems at first to exist in it’s own scale, in it’s own system of perspective. But then you notice how it intersects and interacts with the other elements. A shock!
 
Two soldiers, are tucked in the bottom corner of the painting, hidden from the road, sharpshooters, ready to pick off passers by. Their silhouette, with the distinctive cockade-ed cap is familiar from paintings, prints, movies, etc. - French soldiers circa Napoleon, identified by their ‘significant profile’ like one identifies a type of bird. Each member a no-name, called only by their species.
The soldiers, like the flying couple, are in close-up but with their backs to us. You can’t see their faces, you don’t relate to them personally or empathize with their individual lot.
 
Who are these soldiers, these men? Why are they here less than 20 years after the French Terror, after liberty-equality-fraternity, after the poverty of a France stripped to provide luxury, for the ‘1%’.
These men are the massive boot of Napoleon in the thirsty drive for empire. They walked across France, Spain, Portugal. They walked to Moscow. That was their Camino.

The painting Visíon Fantástica o Asmodia is a worldview with multiple systems of perspective and scale in a cohesive ‘natural’ landscape. It is an insistence that the world is all happening at the same time –now- believe it or not.

While walking the Camino it could be easy to feel like you’re living in a 2-d world with only one perspective - me! You’re living in a very local Here and Now: immediate concerns, immediate delights: my feet, my stomach, the folks, the food, the scenery.
 The yellow arrows show you your way, the pilgrim menus are set out for you, your bed awaits, along with the friendly greetings of the ‘hospitaleros’ who have spent their day cleaning up after you and preparing for you.

Prompted by the ubiquitous coquilles Saint-Jacques, Scallop shell motifs you assume a simple identity: The Pilgrim. You look at the path in front of you and look at the path behind you. The Camino is a line!
And yet,
The Camino was and continues to be created over time: thousands of people walking in a long line following in each others' footsteps, separated in and distinguished by Time. A thousand years of Time.
Each day, there are the ones who went before me (some probably woke me up!) and the ones who come behind me, following in my footsteps, different times, different perspectives. With the dimension of Time, the line unfolds into a 3-dimensional world.

Painted Steps will be seen one day, all at once. All in good time!
"Stay calm, wait for the sign",

Buen Camino!

addendum
-------------------------------------------------------------
Dimensional thinking:
 
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions is a satirical novella by the English schoolmaster Edwin Abbott Abbott, first published in 1884 by Seeley & Co. of London.  
To
The Inhabitants of SPACE IN GENERAL
And H. C. IN PARTICULAR
This Work is Dedicated
By a Humble Native of Flatland
In the Hope that
Even as he was Initiated into the Mysteries
Of THREE Dimensions
Having been previously conversant
With ONLY TWO
So the Citizens of that Celestial Region
May aspire yet higher and higher
To the Secrets of FOUR FIVE OR EVEN SIX Dimensions
Thereby contributing
To the Enlargement of THE IMAGINATION
And the possible Development
Of that most rare and excellent Gift of MODESTY
Among the Superior Races
Of SOLID HUMANITY

 Visíon fantástica o Asmodea - Scale of Space / Scale of Time
Thinking of history as the backstory.

The really difficult thing about copying Goya’s Visíon Fantástica o Asmodea was not technical. It was coming to feel it’s emotional impact, as I came to a fuller realization of what the painting is about.
 
The composition of Visíon Fantástica is like a twist screw. It’s a vast roller coaster of a landscape with breathtaking shifts of scale. My first impression of it at the Prado was of contrasts; darks, lights, mass, gravity, closeness and distance within the spectacular scale-play of the painting. It’s with that impression that I began my painting.
 
Of course, I knew from Visíon Fantástica’s context as a “Pinturas Negras- Black Painting” that it was ‘dark’. But I found that the significance of the imagery only slowly dawns on you as you figure out what exactly those marks mean that you are trying to copy.
As you are painting, the story gradually comes into focus. The terrifying plot unfolds.

It seemed obvious to consider this painting in 4 parts: the floating couple, the mountain, the soldiers, the trail of people. Each element seems to have its own scale, to follow its own perspective. In some ways each seems to inhabit its own world. But they fit together, in a particular (Goya) way, with no hint of ‘surrealism’.

In this element a man and woman cling together, hovering above the land, isolated in their own ‘perspective’ their own scale, own law of gravity. She is looking off to the left, behind. He, with agonized looks, points to the right, towards the distant mountain. The woman is cloaked and veiled and seems to have pantaloons. Because they are the largest figures, they seem to be the main protagonists. Because they are in ’close-up’ we can relate to them as individuals. I can easily see an escape towards somewhere else. They are fleeing, perhaps into danger, maybe safety, but leaving a lot behind.

The painting got it’s name “Visíon Fantástica o Asmodea” from Antonio Brugada, Goya’s friend, colleague and his cataloguer. The name ‘Asmodea’ contains allusions to Hebraic literature, the Book of Tobias, “El Diablo Cojuelo”, a seventeenth-century literary work by Vélez de Guevara, and Classical Greek mythology. In the first Prado catalogue in 1900 it was titled “El Aquelarre” or Witches Sabbath. This is said to be because of some connection between other floating figures and witches in Goya’s work. The work is a state treasure.
 
Are these titles a distraction from a more straightforward interpretation?
 
I don’t know exactly what Goya was thinking, intending, what his personal frame of reference was, and there is a layer of almost 200 years of interpretations through which my personal understanding is coloured. But certainly more straightforward contemporaneous connections can be made.
 
Goya knew refugees. Twelve years earlier the town of his youth, Zaragoza, was besieged and invaded.  “It was particularly noted for its brutality”, (wiki) (compared to regular rape/pillage/burn?).  Napoleon himself, as well as his armies, invaded Madrid, Goya’s home. I remember the shock of seeing military troops in the streets of Montreal, helicopters landing on the roof of police headquarters across from my school during the  War Measures Act of 1970.  Compared to Goya’s experience, this was a drop in the ocean.
 
On the Camino de Santiago de Compostela, the ‘Route Napoleon’ signifies the steep, challenging hiking trail over the Pyrenees from St-Jean to the albergue (hostal) in the monastery at Roncesvalles. We forget it’s literally Napoleon’s army’s route for invasion (and retreat) through Spain on its way to beat the United Kingdom in Portugal.
 
In contemporary terms, it’s not unexpected that an artist would express the traumatic events of their life through their art.
In terms of European art / history a parallel could be drawn between the structured formations, and splendidly choreographed armies of ‘traditional’ warfare and the court paintings by Goya of royalty in regalia.
I could also draw a parallel between the war waged by Spanish soldiers against the French in ‘guerrilla’ fashion, and the personal, emotional and unconventional “Black Paintings’ in Goya’s home.
 
The ‘events’ of the years 1808 to 1814 when Goya was in his 60’s have many titles, in various foreign and Iberian languages:

• La Guerra de la Independencia, War of Independence
• Francesada, Invasión francesa de España French Habit, French Invasion
• Guerra peninsular, Peninsular War 
• Guerra de españa, Spanish War
• Guerra del francés, French War
• Guerra de los seis años, the Six Year War

The more I research the more complicated it gets. To get to the bottom of the contradictions, discrepancies, simplifications, mistaken facts, is a lifetime's work.

So many points of view – the only unifying factor - horror!

The poetic ‘big picture’ composition of Visíon Fantástica o Asmodea is easier to face... at first!
So exhausting writing about it. This is where Art will take you!
I’ll just keep going, slowly, on track, like walking the Camino when it gets hard. Thankfully, no army is chasing me.

Buen Camino!

It’s time to add another Goya painting to Painted Steps.I’m thinking about the 14 Pinturas Negras, the so-called Black Paintings that hang together in the Museo del Prado.

Goya had originally painted these images on the walls of his own house on the outskirts of Madrid. He painted them between 1820-23, after a sickness had left him deaf, and before he fled to Bordeaux.  (Coincidently this house had previously been named Quinta del Sordo (House of the Deaf Man). Fifty years later the murals were transposed onto canvas, ‘restored’, and given to the Prado Museum. I got to spend time in the Black Paintings room in the Prado on three separate days.

I’m considering choosing one of the 3 big “landscapes” from the room. These are horizontal canvases about 4ft x 12 ft. (1500cm x 400cm).
The choices are: Two giant men, seen from the knees up, whacking each other in turn, a dance of gods?
Or
The one with the castle on the hill, the two floating figures and the French soldiers tucked into the right bottom corner,
Or
the Four Fates? Impossibly floating, thick, ugly, relentlessly brown, each holding an apparently symbolic object; scissors, a manikin, a magnifying loop?
 
What to choose? All three are vivid in my mind.
 
The first two stand out because of their lovely colours -blues and golds. I want the blue colour. It’s a bit of relief and hope in that room.
It’s possible that the colour was actually added as a touch-up in the reconstruction process, after the paintings were peeled off the walls in 1874. I can understand why.

Visión fantástica o Asmodea
I‘m choosing “Visión Fantástica o Asmodea” the one with the big blue hill and what reminds me of my favourite magical element, a flying carpet.
 
I will place it in the space to the left of the “Royal Family of Charles IV’ (still unfinished). It will not be fitted into the height of the space, but will be "floating" or ‘pinned’ into the space available.

I paint from a reproduction in an art book and from a digital reproduction on the Prado website.

I did a couple of pen sketches to get a handle on the basic scale, shape and values.

Gouache is a surprisingly plastic medium. It dries quite quickly like water-colour, but because it is water soluble, it can be blended on site. It can be layered in washes and also painted on opaquely in blocks. I can make tiny strokes, or feather over textured layers in an effect reminiscent to intaglio printing.

After a painting session, the unused gouache can be left on the pallet, waiting for next time. It needs only to be briefly re-wetted. So rather than starting from scratch, with a pallet of pure colour fresh from the cake,(tube), I re-enter the process each session with a range of ready-mixed colours and tones.
I love it! It’s so direct! (compared with etching).

The place on Painted Steps where Fantástica is painted has bare paper as well as strokes of yellow, gold & blue gouache, the structural gestures I painted on the first day. These pigments were mixed with white glue and so are fixed- water-fast-won’t blend into the over painting. You can faintly see the marks through the picture. In contrast to the opaque quality of gouache, they give a slight ephemeral quality to the image.

Rather than starting with pencil sketch as I did with the Royal Family, I’ll work with a version of imprimatura  method, the composition first blocked out in terms of tone as a scaffolding for the specific representations/details.

I put on the timer and paint in 30 minute blocks.

I struggle to capture the qualities of the Goya painting and win some/ lose some. – I achieve clarity and detail at the expense of the ephemeral quality of the mountain. Best I can do but of course I miss the emotional impact of the painting …the fragility of hope, perhaps.

So I have to think about what I am trying to achieve with this painting? First, it’s painting as a noun. A painting. It’s a souvenir -“See what I saw”- like a post card. It’s not a copy in the sense of faithful reproduction, but certainly close enough to be a reminder of the actual painting.

Why not just clip in a photo? Because, secondly it’s painting as a verb. To paint. I’m using the act of painting to really explore the original work, to look, to see, to notice and notate as best as I can what I can see. My painting is act of transposition, re-construction, like singing along… learning the words to a song. I am trying to really listen (see) to what Goya is saying, to really see what he is showing, to grasp what he is evoking.
 
Painting /drawing, is a great way to examine an object. To paint is to use the brush as finger, touching, and tracking with paint the accumulated knowledge. The snapshot would record what’s there, what it looks like, what the camera sees. It’s passive. To paint/ draw is to record what you found/saw. Being active.

In the years between his birth in 1746, making these paintings 1820-23 and before leaving Spain for Bordeaux in September 1823, what had Goya seen?

I’m not trying to copy the painting as artifact but to walk a little in his shoes. 
It’s a walk that haunts me during the two weeks I’m working on the painting.
 
!Buen Camino¡

****************************************************************
Addendum
 
Laurie Anderson *
“I wanted you. And I was looking for you
But I couldn't find you
I wanted you. And I was looking for you all day
But I couldn't find you. I couldn't find you

You're walking. And you don't always realize it
But you're always falling
With each step, you fall forward slightly
And then catch yourself from falling
Over and over, you're falling
And then catching yourself from falling
And this is how you can be walking and falling
At the same time”

A picture's worth a thousand words
A picture tells a thousand lies
The truth lies in perspective.

The actual painting of the Cometa Roja, red kite, is only 2 inches square, a small addition to Painted Steps, but it can activate a much larger space giving the sensation of distance and speed.

One of my basic rules for Painted Steps is that all the little pictures (icons) have to be of things I actually saw. The pictures are painted from photos, and mainly from my own photos along the Camino.

In Painted Steps, I've used photography in a number of different ways.
 
The photos I took along the way are snapshots. Their intent was to store and carry information, to transport ‘evidence' of being there. They are souvenirs, aide-memoires, notations, a reminder for later.
 
But as Painted Steps has progressed I’ve found the need to use photography to capture the stages of the painting of my pictures, to use photos as tracks in the sand. I seem to need to show the trail from where the painted image comes.
 
And then an unexpected development has cropped up; using photography to create new narratives, delineating relationships between the icons, and between the icons and the ground.

Photography creates another layer of mediated experience, from looking at a painting about an experience, to looking at a photograph of a painting about an experience. The photo has made decisions for you, edits your experience of seeing Painted Steps.

The camera is an intermediary, expert at creating new relationships, contexts, generating new illusions, tales, and excitement. It’s all a question of perspective, point of view.

The photo is a vehicle for showing what the photographer has seen, to encourage you to put your attention on certain things. The language around these photo technologies has become metaphorical. To focus on…To frame a topic… To contextualize… To expose…
The camera can seem to deliver, to bring things close to you, or to take things away, to distance you.

 Slow Travel, Slow art, Slow down thoughts…
 
To think thoughts out clearly, I need the mediation of physical media. Unlike words, mediums with physical properties make demands of specific space, time and place. Things need time, things need place. Things make demands according to their inherent nature and the forces moving them.

So I etch, paint, draw, construct. The rapid shape-shifting of thoughts and words is slowed down in the mediation and transposition to the physical world. It helps me keep on track, stay focused. The Camino is the perfect metaphor.
 
The rules or terms of engagement of my painting are being evolved as the painting is made; the path is created by my going there, my taking the Journey.

BUT How lovely that the Camino path already exists!
 
Slow Travel, Slow art, Slow down thoughts…
Like the Caracol…and the Cometa….

‘Addendum’
"Telling the truth creates fiction.
The cartographer is thus constantly making judgments about what to include, what to leave out and what to show in a slightly incorrect place.”
 
This issue assumes importance as the scale of the map gets smaller (i.e. the map shows a larger area) The absolute positions of major roads are sometimes a scale distance of hundreds of meters away from ground truth, because of the overriding need to annotate (point out) features."

I found myself getting stuck in the mud of “purple prose” trying to write descriptions of the delights of walking the Camino.
Then I remembered. This is not the story of walking the Camino.
This is the story of the making of a painting about walking the Camino.

Transformation / mediation,telling the truth creates fiction.
Truth is discovered through relationship not isolation.

So I will tell you why I chose, and how I painted in, Milano Real, the Red Kite, Cometa Roja.
In the days before I saw the Kites I had been walking through narrow wooded valleys, on dirt paths, along brooks and streams. I hiked down steep stony ridges, on loose rock, eyes on the bony trail, watching every step, looking down.

But in the stretch between Zubiri and Larrasoaña the tricky footwork eased and the landscape opened up into rich rolling velvety green farmland. The big blue sky was alive with gusting winds and soaring birds of prey.

Walking up and down with the roll of the hills I looked up at the underbellies of the huge raptors close overhead,and then as they swooped into the valleys I  looked down to see their dark elegant profiles from above.  Dizzying! Exhilarating!
(I’m glad I’m not a small furry creature!)

Of course I started snapping shot after (bad) shot with my phone camera, trying to capture their exuberance. The results were blurry dots nowhere approaching the splendour of the real. But after I gave up, I was rewarded with an amazing experience.
There was a golden flash just above my head as the giant Red Kite caught the sunlight, swooped and flashed at me, the very image of a magnificent mythical raptor. What an honour!

The image stayed with me and is going into the painting.

On the crest of one hill there was a park billboard with the silhouettes identifying the various bird types and naming them in Latin, Spanish and Basque/ Euskera: Milvus milvus, Milano Real, Milano Benetako. In English it’s Red Kite.
I like the literal translation Cometa Roja, in reference to the long streaming tail of the bird. (Roja=red, cometa Latin root as in (celestial) comet).
 
I identified my bird with the help of that info/signage and photos. The descriptions from the internet described the place as the perfect habitat: rolling hills, pasture land for sheep, ( the brebis Basque), dairy cows, horses, farms, and, tucked in the folds, farm buildings, thickets and fording streams. 
Lots of habitat for little creatures, lots of food for raptors.
 
The Study
As practice for painting Red Kite/Cometa Roja directly into the ground of Painted Steps,(PS) I made some studies. They are on grey Rives 270gsm, torn down from 30 x 40”(approx). It has a similar weight, absorption and colour to the Somerset green/grey of PS.

In the study I can use background paint to make big changes in the shape of the bird. Here I covered over the wing shape in (sky) blue in my attempt to figure out the wing angles. This over-painting is not possible when painting directly onto the already defined background of P.S. I have to get it right!

This time rather than ‘finishing’ the study, I worked it just enough to get the gist of the image, leaving the ‘mistakes’ as is. I had figured out what to do next time, once painting directly onto PS.
This process worked well for Cometa Roja. I am able to paint loosely- The image is not a solid opaque block, but is made of quite loosely knitted brushstrokes, giving the image an airy feeling. (even a bit of the background green is seen through the image)


I doubt that I would have been able to paint so easily the ubiquitous and (literally) iconic bald eagle. Living in Victoria BC, I’ve seen so many representations of the eagle, it’s difficult to see it clearly as a creature.
It is of the Americas and particularly of the north west coast.
I’m aware of its rich cultural baggage. The mythologies colour my perceptions.
 
The Kite, the Milvus milvus however, is a creature foreign to my imagination. Unlike other birds I loved to see along the Camino I have no nursery stories of it. It’s a piece of European culture that I have no associations with. It is a European and North African bird.
 
Somehow this blank makes me aware of how my mind carries so many European stories. I know that the stork, la cigueña, carries babies, that magpies, las urracus, bring sorrow or joy.

Being in Europe, in Spain, I am becoming more aware of how much European culture I carry, and that I don’t often recognize it as foreign. I am of the Americas. I am colonized/ colonizer.
They do say travel expands the mind!
 
The idea that creatures teach us humans is perhaps in all cultures, so.....

Thank you,
                  Red Kite
                  Cometa Roja
                  Milano Real
                                   with your streaming cosmic tail!

A Spiritual Journey -The Camino as a metaphor...  Metaphor as a vehicle….
Why the Journey?

The slow moving Caracol (snail) is one form of wildlife that would seem easy to photograph. To “capture the moment”, there’s plenty of time get close up, try different angles, check the shot, get good focus. Simple.

But stopping to take this picture while walking the Camino involved:

• Actually stopping
• Extricating my wrists from the walking pole straps
• Laying the poles carefully aside- so as not to trip on them (again)
• Unwrapping my scarf
• Taking my water bottle out of my shorts pocket
• Unbuckling the waist and chest straps of the the mochila (backpack)
• Finding a dry spot to lay it down that doesn’t block the path

before finally squatting down, way down, in the dirt, to eye level with the creature.
 
That there is pressure to stay upright and walking, constantly moving, becomes apparent. “Get there”, “Get it done”, “No dawdling” “Cross it off the ‘bucket list’, “Put it behind you”, "Eyes on the prize", etc,.....

The little Caracol is teaching me to resist.

In the studio, several stages are involved in bringing the Caracol de la arboleda into the Painted Steps. I start by making a gouache study from my photos, painting on a small piece of grey Rives paper.

I want the final painting/drawing on the Painted Steps to be a description, almost a reconstruction of the snail, as well as an image of snail. I need to understand how the snail ‘works’, to draw it with understanding.

This kind of ‘representational’ painting, paying close attention, is very exciting, a voyage of discovery.
 
Initially, the creature looks like a cornucopia perched on a snake. The shell seems like a backpack or a camper van, a space to curl up into, not a body part. How does it stay on?

With research I discover that, despite appearances, most of it’s body is inside the shell: its guts, heart, liver, lungs, penis and vagina. The shell holds it in like a bony skin. An exoskeleton?

Learning to notice the tilt of the axis of the shell was the next hurdle. After studying written descriptions and photos of many snails from different angles, I can now see that the shell is not a ball. I’m able to notice the diminishing swirl, the shift in shape of each whorl step, diminishing in precise mathematical proportions.

 I’m figuring out the dark lip, the translucent eye stalks, the ‘legs’. Those dots on their tentacles /antlers are eyes.

Deciding the Caracol’s proper location on Painted Steps was simple. I use my elevation map, the bottom half of stripes-on-a-highway band and find the mark for Zubiri.
For the horizontal placement, it seemed natural to paint it ‘low’, in that intermediate space with bare paper, where the green meets the grey, like the shoulder of a road.

I‘m practicing what’s called ‘Cartographic generalization’.
“A good map has to compromise between portraying the items of interest (or themes) in the right place on the map, and the need to show that item using text or a symbol, which take up space on the map and might displace some other item of information.
 The cartographer is thus constantly making judgments about what to include, what to leave out and what to show in a slightly incorrect place.”

It is so slow to paint/draw satisfactorily this little creature.
I took at least a week!
I wonder how far the Snail could travel in a week!
I wonder…. what is the snail/human ratio of size, speed, distance…..

Buen Camino, little Caracol!

A Spiritual Journey -The Camino de Santiago as a metaphor, metaphor as a spiritual tool, art making as the Path.

In the Pyrenees foothills, just before the steep descent into the town of Zubiri, along what Alain & I call Dinosaur Ridge, this little creature crossed our path.
 
We paused and watched him/her inch, crawl, slither, moonwalk, travel up and across the gravely path in the direction of Santiago.
Much smaller than us, much, much slower, but going just as fast and far in it’s own way.
 
This beautiful creature (in all its manifestations) would accompany us through Navarra, the vineyards of Rioja, over the karst hills of Atapuerca, past the fields of ripening wheat barley oats peas, up the climb onto the Meseta across the blazing Terra de Compos, and into León.
 
We chose the el Caracol as our ‘spirit animal” to guide our walk.
 
The Grove snail is a ‘good’ snail, does no harm to the agricultural growth.
It’s ‘grounded’; walks solid every step of the way, one step (with one foot) at a time, never jumping over the hard parts.
As it’s namesake ‘snail mail’, it’s a metaphor for real, not virtual or alternate real. Real real, here & now, physical, real.
 
And according to the science “they have excellent associative thought which helps them remember the places where they were or where the objects of their surroundings are” - a wonderful trait for our Camino journey, and for the art-making journey of Painted Steps.

You see this sign on posts and walls in the pueblos and towns along the Camino. It means here is  post office for your postcards back home.
 
Peregrinos are encouraged to take a weight off their backs – sort through their back packs, mochilas, box up their unnecessary baggage, and mail it home. In the big main post office in Burgos we saw a number of people taking this advice. There are special large boxes for bicycles.
 
From the corner of my eye, at a quick glance I always read the logo as a snail - maybe not the desired association!

Snail reminds us to GO SLOW
 Stay calm, Look for the signs…

My first ‘Camino miracle’ occured in St Jean Pied-de-Port on the eve of our departure into Spain, our last night before we hit the trail.
We were on a terrace enjoying this delicious dinner, something with meat and oranges, and we struck up a conversation with a fellow at the next table whom we thought might be a pilgrim which he turned out to be.
 
A youngish Swiss man, he told us he had been walking for weeks, having started the Camino in Le Puy-en-Velay, near Lyon, in France over 700 k away. He was having a short stay in St Jean before continuing towards Santiago. He was still enjoying himself and was happy to answer our somewhat anxious questions.
 
He generously offered us our first piece of on-the-trail advice:
Stop every two hours, take off your shoes and socks and dry them out, rest. Trust me.
 
 And we did. For the next 500k, every two hours we allowed ourselves to stop walking, to sit down, take off our shoes/boots. Sometimes we had a bite to eat, paddled in a stream, made drawings, prints, lay in the grass (or dirt or rock), had a siesta!
 
This way we avoided making blisters, infections, pain, misery, slogging, boredom and using pharmaceuticals.
 
It is a great piece of advice!
The miracle is that we took it!
 
Thank you, our first peregrino, like our spirit animal, showing us how not to be in a rush to get there.

The grove snail or brown-lipped snail (Cepaea nemoralis) is a species of air-breathing land snail, a terrestrial pulmonate gastropod mollusc.
It is among the largest and, because of its polymorphism and bright colours, one of the best-known snails in Western Europe.
The width of the shell is 18–25 mm. The height of the shell is 12–22 mm. with from 4½ to 5½ whorls.
This snail is comparatively slow-growing, usually taking three years to develop from an egg to a breeding adult.
It is used as a model organism in citizen science projects.[4]
 
Cepaea nemoralis predominantly moves in an upwind direction.
They first randomly move in any direction before following the upwind stream. The decision to move upwind is made when the odor of favored foods is detected.
Those dots are their tentacles /antlers are eyes.
They can move their tentacles up or down to improve their ability to see.
The sense of sight of snails is useful but only to detect changes in the intensity of light to recognize whether it is night or day
They are practically deaf since they have no ears nor ear canal.
To compensate this absence of hearing they have an excellent associative thought which helps them remember the places where they were or where the objects of their surroundings are.
 
 

My Prado Museum experience was a perfect counterpoint to walking the Camino.

The bottom band of Painted Steps is the place for painted studies from the works of Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes and Hieronymus Bosch, El Bosco, the two artists’ work that I spent the most time with in Madrid.
This bottom band starts as a horizontal stretch of bare paper interrupted by vertical pillars and patches painted in to indicate placeholders or niches.

I’m using this space for visual footnotes or commentaries, or as a Greek chorus, or as emphasis, like drawing a line under a word.

The Bosch are all in one room: The Adoration of the Magi Triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights Triptych, The Haywain Triptych, the Table of the Seven Deadly Sins, and Extracting the Stone of Madness and others.
The triptychs are displayed on large plinths, opened, free standing and showing the backs as well as the fronts. The backs of the ‘doors ‘are painted in monochrome grisaille, somber, meaning to be closed during Lent.
And opened splendidly to reveal the inside. No reproduction of Bosch of any size or close-up-ness prepared me for the gorgeous colour, crystal clarity, and focused wealth of information in these works.

The Goyas are in a few separate places in the Museo. The Black paintings taken from the walls of the Quinta del Sordo (country house of the deaf man) in Bordeaux, stretched and hung in the Prado in the 30’s, are together.
There are the rooms of paintings Goya was commissioned to make as cartoons for tapestries.
There is gallery with the Royal portraits, with the centerpiece- The Family of Carlos IV 1800).
(near to Velasquez’ las Meninas – (The family of Felipe IV 1656)

The first one I chose to paint is the royal family of Charles? Carlos IV, a group portrait of parents, children, cousins, whose familial dysfunction had lethal consequences.
The painting is huge, the figures seem life size.
The occasion is formal but the individual portraits are intimate.
 
I spent a fair amount of time over 3 days with this painting, looking, going elsewhere, returning, taking a break at the Prado café, returning again and discussing it with my partner.

It’s amazing to see it close up and real.  The brush strokes are so loose and relaxed, and super descriptive…the chiffon layers of the dresses, the grosgrain ribbon of the ‘Order of the Golden Fleece medals (that everyone is displaying) the velvet breeches, brocade, skin over flesh……

You can see the magic happen.
The brushstroke of paint and the picture of the thing –spark in my mind - become ‘real’.  Brilliant!!
This is the power of human imagination- a species-selected trait.

Also representational painting is not something I’ve used much, being more a drafter or constructor of images.
So basically I have to work out a method, technique, process, skills...
I’m painting from a number of reproductions wildly different in size, colour, tones, levels of detail.

These reproductions are to the real-life painting as Skype is
to a real hug.

To start I made multiple sketches from the various sources on drawing paper, layering and tracing adjustments in my attempts to ‘copy’ the painting.
 
I became aware of how complex this painting is, not formally, but in terms of the human relationships.
 
It took a lot of looking and sketching to see these gestures- the way Isabella’s strong arm divides the composition, her holding her son’s hand proudly…her son - her achievement in bearing heirs, timid Carlos peaking out behind his cousin his little hand around the waist of the tyrant-to-be- Ferdinand,

I sketched “The Royal Family” in place on the right hand panel of Painted Steps. I blocked it in with pencil lines, noting that the soft paper would not lend itself to erasing, my usual MO.

I am going to add, change, shift, with paint itself, relying on the layering and opacity of gouache.

I will have to learn to paint!

And in the course of making a picture of this painting, I wandered down many interesting avenues: the Order of the Golden Fleece  (a 19th c ‘club card’), Spanish history of succession, revolution, classism, and the Spanish shoe industry, as well as family gossip.
It’s not an easy painting.
I put it aside and work on other parts.(TBC)

In the top band I intend to paint variations of the Camino shell motif and yellow arrow that guide us along the hundreds of kilometers.
I want to paint in some of the artwork I saw outside, recent public art made for the Camino, as well as historical works.I'm not exactly sure where it will go.

The basic structure is in place, all I have to do is paint it!

On the Camino no satellite GPS is needed: the shells and painted arrows point the way!
 

“Stay calm! Be brave! Wait for the signs!” *
*Thomas King “The Dead Dog Café Comedy Hour”  CBC Radio1997 to 2000

For Painted Steps, I need to figure out where along the green/ sienna/ gold/ band I should paint the little pictures.
I need benchmarks, a plotting of towns, villages  along those 500k from St Jean to León.

I use the information given to us in St-Jean at the office of Les Amis de Saint-Jacques- Friends of St. James/Santiago.
 
The sheet plots the elevations of the Camino and the distances between towns and pueblos from St Jean to Santiago.

SO, several, (several!) hours later of scanning, cropping, stitching parts together with PAGES, printouts, scotch tape, re shrinking another 5%, my own spin on ‘cartographic welding’, I produce an 88 inch long elevation line map St Jean to León.

This map reads as usual left to right (west to east) so I reverse it by tracing the line of elevation onto transparent tracing paper and flipping it over.

(The flip/flop is something I’ve used a lot in printmaking where plate and imprint are left/right reversed).
I spread the painting, the 2 sheets of Somerset, on my long table, tack the tracing paper in place and redraw the line with sufficient pressure to transfer the pencil mark onto the painting.

Here it is on the painting. It’s an abstract plotting of the elevations of the actual path but it appears to be a mountain range in a landscape! Change of perspective....

Now I can locate the towns,  I can place the little pictures.

I have another idea.
The somewhat relentless band of grey is meant to be another place for this same line.
 
I transfer the the line onto the grey with white conté using the bottom of the band as the bottom of the image …then flip it and hang it upside down in a mirror image.

It’s created a rhythm.

I like the way it also makes a path in the space between the two elevation lines.
I want to make it feel like the act of the Camino,
step by step …pasito a pasito ….

The little white ticks mark the towns and pueblos. At each shift in direction of the lines I pencil a vertical, making sort of lines of ‘latitude’, segmenting the continuous space, suggesting to me -day after day- step by step- heartbeat followed by heartbeat.

Then What?

I try painting tonal intervals, trying to give a sense of the up and down my feet felt, the large and small shifts in effort and incline.
Quite beautiful, but impossible as a system.

I tried the idea of a kind of contour map to describe the changes in surface of the path.
The problem is that I was forcing a square peg into a round hole i.e. a the concept of a 3 d space, the actual foot path onto the concept of a 2d line the elevation map…

The dilemma discussed with my partner, we came up with the idea of using colour rather than tone.

Obvious to some!

For me, using etching as a fundamental medium and paradigm I’ve long been able to compartmentalize these aspects; tone, light, dark, composition design/ hue saturation etc.

Now I have to learn to use paint.

I start painting the intervals. Beautiful!
Each and every segment a different colour, contrasting more or less abruptly, smoothly warmly, shining, dull.
Like the weather, like the landscape ...new each time.

The peak is the Alto de Perdón -a nice long climb up from Logroño, (Fortunately there is an ice cream van at the top.This is not the West Coast Trail) and a very steep hike down on loose stones.

I can paint about 8 inches at a sitting. (Camino questions.."how much did you do today?")
 
Simply painting in the intervals makes a good change from the finicky tracing and computer work and/or from the intensity of painting the little representational pictures. It’s really relaxing and soothing but also absorbing to paint ‘just’ colour.
 
So, to quote from another well known journey-
Salut to another rosy-fingered dawn!

I saw in Madrid, a most significant object, linking the gold in the churches, the path of the Camino and home: Juan de la Cosa’s mapamundi (map of the world), made in 1500 that includes the earliest surviving European mapping of the Americas.

on parchment  3' x 6' approx.

Having laid the ground (literally the background) of Painted Steps, I’m gathering up images of individual things about the Camino I want to put into the painting, like the little pictures of people, cities, sea monsters and gods, found on maps like this.

I make lists of the birds, plants, animals, structures, dovecotes, peloté courts, oats, peas, barley, wheat, almond trees, a dust devil, goldfish, bugs, butterflies, outcroppings, wild boar…..
 
......remembering the first day, the first place, I  came across this new creature, or thing.

I make pen sketches and gouache studies using various sources:
my souvenir photos, my partners photos, brochures picked up and carried along the Camino, and images from the web: from personal and commercial websites about The Camino, government, agricultural, scientific, and historical websites, universities, clubs, societies, and Wikipedia, in English French and bits of Spanish.

Las urracas – magpies-  on the green lawns of the Opus Dei Universidad de Navarra on the outskirts of Pamplona / Iruña - a lovely parkland walk as we head out for the Alto of Perdón.

I was thrilled to see the storks, a fairy tale bird–reminds me how European fairy tales actually are. My first sighting was a nest on a pole/tower as we approached Puente la Reina.
I wonder if those poles were built for them, or what else is their purpose? 
There, the medieval church tower held 4 or 5 of their bulky nests.
We stopped under the stone archway to hear the bells and the chanting.

Studies of Cometa Rojas, Red Kite- fabulous!  We stopped and watched them swooping over the hills around Zubiri. If I were a lamb I would be nervous.

Distant barns…all that delicious pork?  A reality check.

The unique sighting of el Jabalí -wild boar -on an alternative Camino trail- “the one less travelled” (another quote from Robert Frost) with our Camino friend Terry from Seattle.

The highway barrels straight through the narrow streets of Villafranca Montes de Oca, where we are staying overnight.  Huge semis drive 2 feet away from the door of the Supermercado, little convenience store. The hungry peregrinos/pilgrims rush across for the 5pm opening to buy supplies for supper. Accidents? The residents are hopefully used to taking precautions.

Where along the green/sienna/gold band of the painting do I place the pictures?
Well, extreme right is St Jean - the beginning, extreme left is León,- the end, so I need to lay in a map of distances.


I will do this with the chart given to us by Les amis de Saint-Jacques, the friendly and informative pilgrim helper association in St Jean-Pied-de Port -French, San Juan Pie de Puerto- Spanish,  Donbane Garazi - Basque.

Happy Trails!

Within days of returning home to Victoria, Canada, after  7 weeks in Spain walking the Camino and visiting Madrid, I started “Painted Steps”, getting down on paper my visceral response to this rich experience.

I think of this blog as the Special Features extra of a DVD, a kind of  ‘making of ‘ documentary, telling the back-story, revealing the mistakes, the pleasures and challenges of the project.

I will paint many more little pictures into the middle band, studies of the paintings of Goya and Bosch, it will include  the yellow arrows and shell motif signage seen all along the Camino, elevation map, a trail map, place names.
 
When the painting is complete, the blog will stand as a kind of legend or key to the meaning of the painting.
 
I expect this painting to be complete in 6 months, slow travel, slower painting, much longer  longer the time I spent walking the Camino....

Just as it takes longer to digest a feast than to eat it.

Gouache on SOMERSET, grey/green printmaking paper, St Cuthberts Mill, England
30”h x 88i”w (2 sheets 30 x 44)     770cm x 2200cm

This is the state of the work as it stands so far …..
At the centre of the left panel is an illustration of the Dovecote- el palomar seen near Villalcazar de Sirga

I’ll walk you through the steps of getting to this point and take you along to the end of the painting.

I needed the painting to be ‘this’ wide, spreading out my arms - a wing span. I chose two sheets of a green/grey Somerset I’ve had in my shelf since the 1980’s.(saving them for this?) I laid the paper out on my long table, mixed a bunch of paint and started.
 
Using the convention of north at the top of the page, I paint east to west, right to left, beginning in St Jean Pied-de-Port, crossing the French border and traveling across Spain towards Santiago, working against the habitual current, the 'reading' right to left. I start with the Middle Band.

The Ground Colours
In the Middle Band I paint my sense of the basic colour shift of the landscape  from St.Jean to Leon.

Starting on the right, GREEN, all the richness of Basque country in the Pyrenees’ spring…

...moving towards the middle, crossing the divide between the Somerset sheets, the incredible SIENNA earth colours of the silt and clay of Rioja....

 ...then the high green-y GOLDS of Castile y Leon in the sharp sunrays of June on ripening wheat fields and adobe.

At The Top Band
After 40 days walking the Camino, we stayed a week in Madrid in the Cuatros Caminos district.
Our room was on the top floor of the Hostal Almansa a kind of ivory tower, peaceful in the city of 6 million,
Watching the ceiling fan whirling madly, watching the sky storming- wind, thunder and lightning, trying to rain, but failing in the 39c heat. 
Intense and beautiful.

So
Above the green, sienna, and gold area, I paint a band of blues and yellows: the Madrid sky,
and above the sky, I leave a band of bare paper, conventionally a place for decorative elements.

At the bottom of the paper I make another wider band with little marks, little niches in yellow grey gold, reminders of the gilded grapevine trim on the retables /reredos / retables of the golden churches.

This band will be a place for my studies of paintings from the Prado, especially Goya, and Bosch- el Bosco.

Between the gestural bottom area and the brush stroke layers of green sienna gold, I painted a hard-edged strip of neutral grey running flatly, relentlessly, across the paper.

So now I have five distinct horizontal bands, a ground, a place, an arena, for the unfolding/plotting of this journal.

To paint all this I’ve had to move up and down the seven foot length of the piece….still walking the Camino!

Stencil and Word Portrait Printmaking Workshop
“Me, Myself, and I… and now some additional information …"
with Agnes Ananichuk

Great workshop!
July
Agnes will lead us through a series of stimulating word exercises and share her process in the creation of oil-based monoprint word stencils. She will present an overview of prints where text has been used, and demonstrate the making and printing of word stencils.

Participants will be guided in inking, rolling, and printing colourful bookmarks made from their word portraits. The workshop will inspire new ideas on using text as a visual element and help develop a vocabulary to enhance the creation of “selfies”.

For the past year at GZPS Desiree has been the Intern as well as a regular studio member and has produced an amazing body of prints.
It's great to see some of her work in a more formal setting.
The prints will be up for a bit longer if anyone wants to drop by -studio hours tues eve, and daytime thursday and friday, 250-382-2186

This small aquatint etching is one of a group of three, on the same theme. For me, it contains a universe: the fire, friends, the moon and stars, the beach and the ocean beside.
I'm so pleased to have this as the latest addition to my art collection!

Wondering around the mountain surrounded 'campus' on the day of my arrival, waiting for my hotel room to be ready.
My ID DOLL against the mountain.

Taking possession of my beautiful sky-lighted studio in Glyde Hall. There are 24 artists Residency artists meeting that first day with staff, artist facilitators, Thematic faculty. Fantastic getting to know them.

The morning of my last (BAIR) day, before my studio show, I made it down to the river,the Bow, frozen at the edges.

Efren Quiroz   Curator

Basic curatorial proposal: To invite thirty artists to make a 30 in x 30 n piece in response to "Abstract painting (1985) 587-5" by the German artist Gerhard Richter.

“The name of the exhibition is "Difference and Repetition" which is a reference to the book by Gilles Deleuze. The concept is based on Deleuze's idea of how a new series brings back an older series and transforms it into something completely new, so that repetition brings about difference. The source of this series will be a single painting "Abstract painting (1985) 587-5" by the German artist Gerhard Richter (see attached image).

I chose this painting by Richter because it was created as a result of a series of unpredictable chaotic or gestural actions that make it difficult to reproduce. But it is also a work that evokes many possibilities.

It is essential that your piece be created in response to this specific Richter painting as the whole concept of the show is of a series derived from a single source and the repetitions and variations that result from it. For that reason I want the pieces to be a specific size 30 x 30 inches though the medium is open.”

The Slide Room Gallery,

Vancouver Island School of Art (VISA),

2549 Quadra Street.

November 1 - December 2, 2013.

My final piece, "Repeat after me" contains 64 spaces, the 64 possibilities of the I Ching.
Cardboard intaglio  30" x 30" with a monoprint 'copy' of the seminal Richter piece, & polymer litho.
It seemed a good opportunity to explore some of the inherent qualities of repetition and difference inherent in the printmaking medium so I made a decision to response through in printmaking: gestural monoprint, colour separation digital lithography and knife cut intaglio.

"Dis-asemblage Blue", Dis-asemblage Red, Dis-asemblage Black", 3 lithos mimicking colour separation printing process, but drawn in an expressionistic stye.The have been printed into "Repeat after me" and also are their own editions.

'Like' as in
'the same as'

Like as in appreciating, enjoying, caring about'
The softness of the image results partly from the drypoint-ish technique and partly from the colour of ink: graphite.

The ' Me' repeated, and repeated, referrs to myself, but refers to a different me each time,  I was at a different age, so different experiences, physically etc, and also seen and experienced through different relationships, am different.
The scanner can't figure out the medium; a not unusual problem when scanning etchings and other prints.

 “Nic @ Mac"
Artiste au travaille  /Artist at work. ..
on the laptop
Sugar lift on copper,
Vernis au sucre sur cuivre,
chine collé,  Papier Stonehenge
4" x 5"
Edition 8

Sugarlift
Home made sugar syrup
Watersoluble Black ink
Soap flakes

The image was drawn with a brush and sugar lift on an old copper plate.
I bit the plate in the same ferric bath that I bite zinc -Open Bite for 2 hrs 15 minutes.
I used the new coloured Stonehenge paper-"Kraft", and bright white Chinese rice paper for the chine, with Graphic Chemical Vine Black ink.