Travels in pictures – part I

Popular demand (believe it or not!) made me do it: Over the course of the next few days I’m going to post the travel draw­ings and prints of the last few years. Today starts with my per­son­al book of gen­es­is, the ink draw­ings from 2016’s Paris – Rome tour. Next in the queue are the etch­ings designed after these draw­ings, the doc­u­ment­a­tion of the recent short jour­ney east­wards and finally the exper­i­ments from last sum­mer in France. I’ll keep the tech­nic­al notes about which I’m usu­ally ram­bling too much to a minimum.

If any of these draw­ings depict a place or a scene of great sig­ni­fic­ance, it’s by pure chance: Generally, their choice has been dic­tated by where we could sit down, in the dry, with no press­ing busi­ness ahead of us. Hence long gaps, no Paris nor Rome (but why did I not draw the pope!?), plenty of ran­dom coun­tryside loc­a­tions – after two months I had 18 canon­ic­al draw­ings in my bag, and about half a year later two more intric­ate remakes joined the set.

Dijon, Café des Beaux-Arts on the rear side of the Palace of the almighty Dukes of Burgundy. A nice little park area to sit down in, write post­cards, draw a bit – the portal was struck by per­fect graz­ing light. 

The Cathedral of Besançon. A free organ con­cert gave us an excuse to sit still for an hour. They played Buxtehude, I seem to remember. 

Pontarlier, the myth­ic­al French absinthe cap­it­al in which some of our weirder adven­tures took place. There is little exag­ger­a­tion in this image, the spiders were there in fact. 

By the point we arrived to Le Locle I was lack­ing a chal­lenge, always just draw­ing archi­tec­ture. Slightly freaked out by the insane amount of tidi­ness we encountered in Switzerland I decided to remove just that. This was the view from our hosts“ win­dow, out­side it was rain­ing non-stop (not depicted). 

Tramelan: For once we got a nice land­scape view from our hosts“ place. The cows did not cooper­ate and went away as soon as I star­ted to draw them. 

Bern, Bärenplatz: Still unhappy about just get­ting to draw stand­ard archi­tec­ture I flooded this square that lies tens of metres above the riverbed. 

Bern, the next day, lack­ing its pre­vi­ously burn­ing sun. 

Fribourg, back even­tu­ally to stand­ard archi­tec­tur­al stuff. The spec­tac­u­lar sun­set spiced up the sky­line sufficiently. 

Parella, a small vil­lage in Piemonte, in our hosts“ garden. Much more than the grand­par­ents“ villa in the back­ground, the main attrac­tion is the garden itself. Meanwhile, not hav­ing drawn any­thing between Fribourg and there, I regret not hav­ing any Alpine pictures. 

Since our hosts in Parella asked for the draw­ing and I did­n’t want to give away the ori­gin­al at that point this is one of two extra pic­tures I made at my desk, many months after the actu­al trip. Comparing the two ver­sion, pre­ci­sion did­n’t quite con­cern me enough. 

Genova, inside Santa Maria delle Vigne. Originally I had planned to add a black lay­er to the draw­ing, super­im­pos­ing the out­side façade of the same church, yet nev­er got around to do it. The interi­or isn’t remark­able for any­thing but the scaf­fold­ing, but even so it’s a nice per­spect­ive exer­cise. I have no clue how I solved it. 

A rocky beach near Sestri Levante. The one viol­ently express­ive draw­ing in the set, its sur­face ripped open by the nib, reck­lessly slash­ing back and forth – in short: This day was shit and so did I feel at the time. Wouldn’t the res­ult almost war­rant embark­ing on a day full of moun­tains, acci­dents, strife and fail­ure on purpose? 

Parma, in front of the Palazzo Pilotta. In case you vis­it the city you have to go inside, for there is a hid­den jew­el inside, a museum on the work of Bodoni, the Parmese typo­graph­er. The draw­ing is just nice and that’s all there is to it. 

Parma, on the roof of our hosts“ place. The brush­strokes on the bot­tom are super­flu­ous and the areas mis­aligned: The fore­ground should have occu­pied a third at most, for the main attrac­tion was the vast land­scape of rooves, antenns and satel­lite dishes. 

Reggio nell’Emilia, the parco del popolo. Here I got the brush out for the first time and promptly under­es­tim­ated how much dark­er the iron gall ink gets when dry­ing: Even though it looks like a night scene it was bright mid­day and the lamps were off. 

Firenze, Loggia dei Lanzi – we spent most of our time there, it seems in my memory. On this occa­sion we did­n’t plan to, we just sought some refuge when it rained for 15 minutes. 15 minutes aren’t enough to make a draw­ing very elaborate. 

Siena – except for Firenze and Bern in rain, most draw­ings took one hour. This is the out­lier: It took one hour and a half till my butt hurt too much to con­tin­ue, sit­ting on some stony stairs in front of San Clemente. 

The view of Siena is the oth­er pic­ture of which there is a second ver­sion done at my desk. This took ages. The hill on the left, unfin­ished in the ori­gin­al, would actu­ally be topped with the cathed­ral. Like a dark por­tion of a draw­ing makes its high­lights appear bright­er by means of con­trast, the city’s beauty might be enhanced by a coun­ter­point of great­er ugliness. 

Siena, San Lorenzo. The rusty col­our approaches its bricks somewhat. 

Anzio. This pic­ture’s appeal might lie in the back­story: The blocks in the fore­ground used to belong to the har­bour con­struc­ted under Nero, Anzio’s most infam­ous scion; the hill in the far dis­tance is the Circeo, the once-island reigned by the sor­ceress Circe who trans­formed Gregor S. into a giant vermin.