It’s been a while since I posted to the blog, so here is a selection of images from our travels over the last two years. This group of photos are of paintings from Thailand, Cambodia, Mustique, Greece, France, England, Spain, Portugal, and Morocco.
Apologies for the quality of some of the photos but a number of the plein air paintings never made it back to the studio to be properly photographed. I have such fond memories of painting them that I figured I would go ahead and post them anyway.
We’ve been living in the Gers region of France now for over a year and I thought I should post some of the work I’ve done. As I’ve written in the past (here and here), the landscapes here are wonderful for plein air painting, and the sort of subjects that I’ve looked for for years.
It’s a very open landscape. Apparently there used to be many more vineyards but they were pulled out in the 20th-century to make more fields for sunflowers and wheat. I’ve always much preferred the later two as subject matter, but if we need vineyards there are still some nearby, and there a lot further north and west where there are more grapes grown for the Armagnac.
The Gers is also wonderfully free of olive trees, as I developed a terrible allergy to olive pollen in Tuscany which ruined the painting season for me from late April to June. The last couple of years in Florence I was reduced to painting still lifes in the Spring as it got so bad (no offense to still life painters). I also developed an allergy to cypress trees, and thankfully there are far less of them here as well.
With all that said, because of the drier summers we’re having in Southwestern France due to climate change, there is talk of farmers starting to plant more olive trees and I’ve seen a couple of new fields of them.
Camille Corot’s painting from 1826 of the Augustinian Bridge at Narni in southern Umbria had a profound effect on me when I was starting out as a landscape painter and I especially loved the subtle blue reflection of the sky in the mustard colored water of the Nera river. For this reason I was very happy to discover that the three major rivers that run down from the Pyrenees and head north past us to the Garonne all regularly have the same ocher water from the clay in the soil.
We settled in the village of Jegun. It’s a charming, vibrant village with lovely inhabitants. It’s also pretty but not too pretty. After 20 years in the center of Florence I was interested in living somewhere where tourism took a back seat to the lives of the locals.
Nearby we have a wealth of picturesque subject matter, including the very beautiful departmental capital of Auch which is only 20 minutes away, as well as agricultural scenes and the rolling hills of Gascony.
It’s been a wonderful first year and we look forward for many more to come.
It’s been over a year now since we left Portugal, and even longer since I last wrote a blog post, but I wanted to show the series of paintings I did while we were living in the beautiful town of Estremoz. I had hoped to exhibit them as a group at the time, but between the Covid lockdowns and our other shows, I never got a chance to organize it.
(Above is a YouTube video of the process for the previous painting).
We loved our three years living in Estremoz. The Portuguese people were as wonderful as everyone says, the towns, cities and landscapes of the Alentejo are gorgeous, and the history and culture is utterly fascinating. I had no idea how much of the world’s culinary culture was influenced by the Portuguese. From the vindaloo curries of Goa, to Japanese tempura, to the multitude of peppers worldwide, Portugal had a huge influence on food everywhere they went.
Today as well, the food in the Alentejo and the Algarve is amazing, and not as well known as it should be. The seafood is especially great, in part because the area south of the Tagus (Tejo) river is the only area in Europe where cilantro is still part of the regional cuisine.
Today there are a lot of great restaurants in Estremoz, but we especially loved Larau and Mercearia Gadanha.
We hadn’t originally planned on living in Portugal. It was one place on our list of possible places after my wife finished her studies at the Florence Academy of Art. But we really liked our time scouting in the Alentejo so we thought we would just look around at possible towns. One problem we had at first is that much of the architecture is designed around small windows as the summers are so hot. As artists we were looking for large windows with a lot of natural light. So we were thrilled when we discovered Estremoz. Much of the town is built on the north facing side of the hill under their castle, and there are a number of old, beautiful buildings with large north-facing windows.
As we walked around on our first visit, we stumbled across a large, ornate, empty building with large north-facing windows. The plaque next to the door read ‘Sociedade de Artistas Estremocense’, the Artists Society of Estremoz, so we asked next door if anything was for rent, and moved in a few months later.
We are very thankful to the Sociedade de Artistas for all their help in getting us settled into their beautiful building, and into the life and culture of Estremoz.
I also painted a few larger paintings. One is posted above, and here are a couple more:
This last one is of my wife on our terrace in the Artists Society building. I love the huge chimneys that you see all around the Alentejo, apparently they were for curing meat for storage.
Overall we had a wonderful time in the Alentejo and it is a period of our life that, despite the Covid pandemic, we will always look back on fondly.
We were back in the Algarve painting landscapes this October. Here are a few of the images. As before, we were based in the small town of Praia da Luz, outside of Lagos. And, as before, we had great weather and were constantly inspired by the beauty of the area.
We painted the rock formations around Lagos a lot as it’s a subject that I find both new and inspiring. Much of the coast in the Algarve faces south, so one has a choice of the various light effects all day long. It’s also easier for working en plein air as there is usually less wind than on the western coast.
That said, we did head over to the western beaches a couple of times:
And we painted a lot around Praia da Luz, where we were staying. I’ve always loved painting palm trees.
At the end of our trip we drove up to Porto Covo, on the Alentejano coast. It’s also a very beautiful area, less dramatic than further south, but with the authenticity we like so much in this region.
Overall it was a great trip. September and October can be two of the harder months for landscape painting in Europe as the colors go very brown in the countryside. The fields are tilled and left, and the rains start again. The coast of Portugal is a great area for painting in this time of year as it’s still often very warm and dry, and the light is as beautiful as always. I highly recommend it.
We recently returned from a couple of weeks of painting in the Algarve region of Portugal. It’s a stunning area, with fascinating geological elements all along the southern coast. Here are some of the paintings:
At the same time, the western coast has a wildness and a grandeur to it that feels a lot like the best parts of the California Central Coast.
We were staying just west of Lagos, but we painted around the town a bunch of times as well. It was especially great to be outside as we’ve been in lockdown more or less since September. This was our first foray out to paint plein air landscapes in months.
