Capturing a journey back to Spain
Our 2008 visit to Spain captured our hearts and souls, in particular, for me, the little village of Guadalest. A tourist trap it might be, but there is a sense of longevity, of firm foundations and the taming of a sometimes malevolent landscape.
Guadalest comprises a small, roadside cluster of inns, hotels, restaurants, and tourist shops (all thankfully reverent), overlooked by a castle constructed upon outcrops of rock that appear to have been forged with the express purpose of inhibiting man-made construction.
No matter your vantage point, near or far, Guadalest provides an unending stream of perfectly picturesque views. Coming from there, I felt I could spend the rest of my life simply trying to capture the essence of this place.
Back home the journey begins
A number of elements merged about the same time for me. Having not painted in many years, I have had the increasing urge to once more pick up a brush and slap colour around in a vague hope of rendering something recognizable. Since the visit to Guadalest in October last year, it has become my great white whale.
The end result is what you see in the above photograph. 23 sheets of paper with as much torment in each as there are brush strokes. But there is no high and mighty ambition to be an artist here, this is a far more personal journey.
I looked at my photographs of the Guadalest towers, and became frustrated by the lack of any sense of being there. Picture postcards with trees and stuff were all they could convey. So I strained to capture something of my personal experience at that place. I moved from illustrative, to abstract, to wash, to stipple, and a slew of other experiments and achieved a convoy of FAIL.
Yet each one took me a step closer to the goal, even if just in part; a particular colour wash perhaps, or the stroke rendering a branch or tree. Books turned up from Amazon, I scoured real artists’ works online and on flickr, and eventually I came to understand where I longed to complete this little journey. All that was left was how.
Chapter 24, the final image
The little image in the foreground of the picture above is the result and I am still breathing a great sigh of relief 24 hours after painting it in an hour of late night creative flurry.
It may seem nothing special – in many ways it is nothing more than a not-completely-crap-little-watercolour – and it is imperfect. But when I look at it, I am returned to that spot; a spot where I sketched the Guadalest bell tower with an ignorant German chap peering over my shoulder and standing far too close for comfort (he doesn’t appear in the above painting, I should add).
Time to move on
I will no doubt come back to painting Guadalest, particularly since we will be visiting there again in April this year. But it’s now time to move to other subjects and I am hoping for a smoother ride than the sometimes intense emotional bursts on this particular journey.
The subject of this post is a direct descendant of the growing changes expressed in the previous one and perhaps serves to colour that one a little more. I long for the time – and energy – to spend struggling to capture all manner of places and experiences, whether in paint, digital images, or words.
That is some time away – though more than a mere dream. For now, creativity is enforced into a minimal regime and remains relegated to tiny, sometimes missed corners of opportunity. It is a pain I feel daily.
