Right. Confession time. Yesterday I signed off saying early start again tomorrow, and today the list said Murano, glass factories, back streets. I got as far as sitting on the edge of the bed with one shoe on. Six days of Venice had quietly emptied me out and the boat left without me, which it will keep doing, it has a timetable and no feelings about my legs.
It was Redentore Sunday out there, the second half of the feast. Fireworks over St Mark’s Basin last night, and today the regattas down the Giudecca canal, the young ones first in their two-oared pupparini, then the men, then the gondolas, and the votive mass in the church itself. Twenty minutes and a whole world away. I stayed on the mainland with a pen instead, and I was completely fine about it.
This was the first one out. A bloke tipped back in a chair, feet up, one hand at his face, in that collapsed shape a person only makes when they have stopped performing for anyone. I hatched the shins hard and left the rest loose, because the looseness is the point. Draw a resting man too carefully and you have just drawn a mannequin having a sit down.
Then a dog, because there is always a dog. A lean one, all leg and shoulder blade, standing side on with the head turned away. Skinny dogs are wonderful and horrible to draw. Every line has to do a job, there is no coat to hide a bad decision under, and if the front leg goes a centimetre wrong the whole animal falls over on the page. This one nearly did. I left his feet as scribble, which is honest, because feet are where I always run out of patience.
The last one is the one I have been circling all week. A knot of people, and only one of them properly there. He gets the eyes, the hair, the hand up near his chin. Everyone else is scaffolding, loops and verticals, faces barely suggested. That is what the Biennale kept telling me on Wednesday and Thursday, that you can take almost everything out and the thing still stands, as long as what is left is the right bit. A crowd is not thirty drawn people. It is one person and a lot of movement around them.
Here is the part that made the day sit right. Fewer than fifty thousand people actually live in the Venice you see on the postcards now, down from about a hundred and seventy five thousand in 1951. The mainland passed the island in 1960 and never handed it back, and there are roughly that same hundred and seventy five thousand living out here in Mestre and Marghera instead. So while Venice rowed its regatta for the visitors, I was in the ordinary half of the same city, washing out, shops shut, drawing. Right side of the water. Murano tomorrow. Probably. More soon.
My last Venice morning, and the famous rooftop everyone climbs for the view has been shut for a year. No matter. I had the Rialto at dawn, an empty St Mark’s, and then the rain turned every lane into a mirror.
Before Redentore’s fireworks fill Venice, an artist walks the empty Grand Canal and Castello’s quiet campos at dawn, sketching a rowing boatman, a hidden Baroque church, and a dog asleep in a moored boat.
Before dawn, Venice belongs to nobody. A solo walk from the Grand Canal to colour-drenched Burano, caught between a sudden lagoon shower and a single white brushstroke that said everything the photographer had been chasing all week.
