Follow the Journey
One artist, one daypack, one sketchbook filling up fast. This is the live map of my working trip through Europe… every pin is a stop on the road and a journal story to go with it. Click a pin to read what happened there, or start from the beginning in the An Artist in Europe journal.
The dotted line is the route so far. New pins land while I keep moving, so check back in. Same pen, new pages.
The famous Sunday market at L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, walked from twenty to nine while it was still cool. Rusted chairs, a canal hung with old linen, a wall of masks, and a lesson in selling from a leaflet.
Saturday's list said one thing, go to Fontaine-de-Vaucluse and find paper. What I got first was a cliff with a castle stuck on top of it, a ruined garden, and a river that comes out of the ground and will not tell you where it has been.
An early loop around the town before the shutters went up, which turned into a dog in a doorway, a cat under the postcards and a brocante with nobody in it. By midday the lot of it was in blue biro.
Gordes was the plan. What I got instead was a weir at ten to nine, a dog holding an empty lane on its own, a pavement table of cyanotypes, and the place where the Sorgue splits itself in two.
A day trip to Arles in the middle of the Rencontres. The photographs are not all in the galleries, they are pasted flat on the walls, bolted into a ruined church, and stacked up beside a yellow cafe that has been shut for three years.
A late note from the same Tuesday. The gallery on the quai keeps its door shut on a Tuesday, which turned out not to matter at all, because the painter was out the front of it.
A Tuesday in L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, which is the one day the sculpture foundation and the painter on the quai both keep their doors locked. So the day went to the working end of the art trade instead, and to two painters who stopped and posed at their own sign.
The afternoon of the same Tuesday, spent on rue Carnot and up an impasse off the rue de la Republique, where twenty makers share one room and everything in it carries a price.
Savoie is behind us. An afternoon in Avignon on the way south, on a street where the river was put to work six hundred years ago, and then on to the Sorgue proper for the next week.
Sunday was meant to be three galleries in one walk. Instead I went up a hill behind Chambéry, then north to a slot in the rock where the Sierroz comes down, and finished the day in a spa town with a locked museum and a wooden woman under a plane tree.
Saturday in Chambéry. Four cast iron elephants with no back ends, a cathedral ceiling that only pretends to be carved stone, and an afternoon in the square drawing two blokes and a dog that had given up on the heat.
Out of Italy and into Savoy, where the flags change but the white cross does not. A first afternoon in Chambéry, the capital Turin replaced, full of shuttered lanes and passages that go straight through the buildings.