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.
A business day in Como and Cantù, where silk built a city and lace built its neighbour. Talks with a silk printing house about printing ink work on fabric, plus 62 reference photos for the studio year ahead.
I said the camera did the heavy lifting in Como and then showed you none of it. Here it is: one iron bracket, one painted ceiling, a cathedral that took nearly four hundred years, a sleeping dog, and a price tag.
The other half of the Colico day. A crow on a chimney with a mountain behind it, and then five hours at the table working through the week s photographs in biro.
A day of sketching in Chiavenna and Piuro, the alpine town buried by a landslide in 1618. Mossy alleys, soapstone workshops, green-glass river water, and evening pages turning gathered photos into working ink drawings.
A July ferry trip to Bellagio on Lake Como, where the crowds rewrote the plan and a stone house covered in retired bicycles stole the day. Five photos, all texture and geometry, for future linework.
Giancarlo Vitali spent ninety years painting Bellano and filled Milan's Palazzo Reale at 88. A day at the Orrido gorge and art set into the village walls becomes a lesson: look harder at what you have.
Back into the gorge at Bellano properly this time. Fifty metres of limestone carved into folds by one stream, walkways bolted to the wall, and the best drawing lesson on the lake.
Skipping the glamorous end of Lake Como, an artist sets up a travelling studio in a village house near Colico, planning a week of daily sketching trips to Bellano, Varenna, Bellagio and Chiavenna.
A sketching day in Florence from the Oltrarno side: gesture drawings in the Boboli Gardens, gallery research on Via Maggio, and the strange story of Giovanni Bastianini, the sculptor whose bust fooled the Louvre.
Inside the Pitti, where the pictures are hung five high and one of them stands in the middle of the room so you can walk round the back of it. Bronzino settling a four hundred year old argument about painting and sculpture.
One jet-lagged day in Rome, seen through an illustrator's eyes: the Colosseum before nine, sketch notes at the Vittoriano, pop surrealism at the Dorothy Circus Gallery, and pricing lessons from the Piazza Navona street artists.
The morning before the long haul into Rome, spent on a canal on the edge of Bangkok. A dove doing scales, a heron standing perfectly still, and a boat full of greens.