Pension Kastelli

Pension Kastelli (Oil on canvas, 12 x 12 in) Private Collection

I painted this after our last trip to Crete and gave it to Pat as a Xmas present. It's a picture of Pension Kastelli, the place we stayed in in Chania and I'm posting it now because we're going back again!

Last year I was so dogged with poor health that there never seemed a time when a holiday would have been enjoyable. Things in the eye department have settled down now and we think a trip abroad to see the Spring flowers on Crete in May is just what the doctor ordered.

We decided on this almost immediately after seeing the John Craxton Retrospective at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. Although he always rejected the label of Neo-Romantic, John Craxton was certainly influenced by the 19th century sources of that movement, William Blake and Samuel Palmer, as well as Picasso's Cubism and spent some time with Graham Sutherland in Pembrokeshire.

However, it was his discovery of the idyllic landscapes of Poros, Hydra and Crete that opened the way to paintings of breathtaking shimmering light with a fascinating technique using coloured lines "to explain the play of light on contours."

John Craxton: Landscape, Hydra (Tempera on canvas)

Of all the paintings in the show, I think it was the one showing asphodels that decided it for us - asphodels are always dead and shrivelled in September when we normally go on holiday: 

John Craxton: Reclining figure with asphodels.

View from the Keep

View from the Keep 2009 (oil on canvas, 36 x 48 ins)

After a while you realise that everything else is just fiddling and you must simply stop. I think it was Picasso who said, "A painting is never finished, only abandoned". Leonardo may have said something on similar lines, but after all, Picasso also said "Bad artists copy. Good artists steal", so who knows, he may have stolen that too.

I've called it a day on this one. I'd forgotten how tiring it is to work on a painting this size, but also how ultimately rewarding.

The photograph was difficult to take. I had to do it in the garden but even though the sun was behind clouds, it's showing a slight darkening to the left (or a slight lightening to the right) which isn't as noticeable in the original. The lens has also made the curvature of the horizon more pronounced, although the skyline does actually do that.

International Artist Day

It's been a disastrous week in terms of getting anything done. Poking myself in the eye on Thursday was not a good move, but by Friday it had stopped hurting quite so much.. Thursdays at the Art Club have been getting pretty crowded, so a number of the artists decided they'd change their day to Friday. I thought I'd try out the new Overspill Day.

When I got there, apart from someone who couldn't figure out how to lock the kitchen door and so hadn't quite left the building, there was no one there. I volunteered to wrestle the kitchen door into submission and he shoved off, leaving me with no one to talk to. The point of going to the Club is to have a bit of conversation, to relieve the cloistered condition of the solitary artist, so this was a bit useless in that respect.

I decided I might as well be on my own in my own studio, as on my own in the Club's, so I packed up my Buildings with Tyne Bridge painting and was on the point of leaving when Old Tom shuffled in. Long story short, we ended up having a cup of coffee together while Old Tom filled me in on more of his life history.

So no work done there then.

Today I realised it was International Artist Day and wondered what I could do to mark the occasion. As it happens, the calender provided the solution. I'd arranged to go with Mo and the Loose Canon back to Bearpark for the Bearpark Artists' Open Studio event. We had a good look round at their work and chatted again to them about the possibilities for future collaborations.

Not actually signalled as an International Artist Day event, but I think it followed the spirit of the occasion adequately. Happy Birthday, Picasso!