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.
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.
A wander through the Venice Biennale's Giardini, from a folded gold ribbon and a piano under a rippling ceiling to feathered figures in a colonnade, plus the 1907 story of how nations came to build permanent pavilions here.
Ten minutes from the queue at St Marks, in a Benedictine church off the tourist route, the exiled Belarus Free Theatre have built the loudest thing I have seen at this Biennale.
Before the Biennale crowds arrive, a dawn walk to the Arsenale, once the largest shipyard in pre-industrial Europe, where revealing a shipbuilding secret meant execution. Now filled with contemporary art instead of warships.
The walk to the Biennale, not the Biennale. A mask maker s bench with forty open pots of paint on it, a gondola holding perfectly still, and a calle you could touch both sides of.
Before the Venice Biennale crowds and heat arrive, one early riser crosses from Mestre to Dorsoduro at first light, finding empty canals, leaning campaniles and a Grand Canal all to himself.
An artist crossing Italy by train skips the Duomo and Last Supper entirely, and instead finds Milan's real spectacle in Milano Centrale, Ulisse Stacchini's 1931 station of arched glass, iron ribs and backlit crowds.
A rest-day ride on the UNESCO-listed Bernina Express leads to Morteratsch Glacier, where year markers since 1878 trace two and a half kilometres of retreat, and to Alp Gruem's donkeys, stone barns, and Segantini's Alpine light.
Off the Bernina train and up the valley to the Morteratsch glacier, which has been walking backwards for a hundred and seventy years. Bare moraine, flowers moving in behind it, and two mules on the way home.
A sketching day in Varenna on Lake Como. Train up, walking trail through the olive trees to Castello di Vezio, eagle owls at close range, then gesture studies on the ferry pier as the lake week wraps up.
Up the hill above Varenna to a thousand year old watchtower, where they cast a new set of ghosts every year, fly owls over your head, and leave raku ceramics out in the grass.