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 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.
In a town that sells everything, I went into the collegiate church, and found somebody had propped three modern abstracts up against a seventeenth century altar.
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.
A morning behind the Royal Palace with the squirrels and a marble head wearing a pigeon, then down to Piazza San Carlo, where half the galleries were shut for August and one show stopped me dead.
I could not sleep, so I walked Turin awake. A Roman gate at first light, a mad stone dome, the Mole up close, the river holding a bridge upside down, and my favourite thing in the whole city, a little green bull that spits cold water.
Turin made its landlords build the footpath a roof in 1606 and never stopped. Underneath it: a Magnum colourist on a banner, a window of antiquarian books, and a workshop packed to the ceiling with plaster casts.
Six days of Venice water and then the train sets you down in Turin, where the whole world suddenly goes straight. A first evening in the old Savoy capital, one bronze count, a dark dome, and a very good dog.
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.
The list said Murano, glass factories, back streets. My legs said something else entirely. So I stayed on the mainland with the actual Venetians and drew all day instead.