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.
First full day in Paris, out at half five. Trocadero before the crowds, four hours in the Petit Palais, and sixty street artists hung salon style in among the marble.
What the Eiffel Tower's doorstep looks like at six in the morning in August, before anybody has swept it. Last night's champagne still lying in the grass, and a floor pattern nobody looks at.
Eight days on the Sorgue done, and a whole day spent getting north. A thank you left on an empty shelf, an hour of somebody else's piano at Avignon TGV, and Burgundy through a dirty window.
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.
Before the paper mill, the reason the paper mill is there at all. The biggest spring in France coming out from under a cliff, a ruined castle above it, and a poet who moved here to get away from everybody.
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.
The other half of the Arles day, the half spent indoors. Zhang Lanpo's giant in a Chinese cliff, a Japanese photographer's children's book about a dog, and three coloured rectangles that taught me something.
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.