Turkey & Greece 2005
Turkey & Greece 2005
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Another ramble in October-November through a beautiful part of Europe, with only carry-on baggage containing a hand-made, 10 x 11 inch watercolour sketchbook (Arches 140# cold-pressed), my Winsor & Newton/Cotman portable paintbox, an Isabey 6202 squirrel-mop travel brush, a small Holbein spray bottle, a Moleskine 5 x 8 inch sketchbook, and a couple of BIC mechanical pencils. This is the same kit I took to Italy in 2004.
We were travelling more spontaneously than in some previous trips, and were less settled in specific places (except for a week in a house in Hania, Crete). I found I got a lot of pleasure out of simple pencil drawings in the Moleskine book, and more success with taking the annotated ones and painting from them later, in hotel rooms or wherever, while the memories of colours and places was still really clear. The annotated pencil drawings themselves are, in some ways, a better aide-memoire for me of the places we visited than are the watercolours, although I doubt that they really work for anyone who hasn't been there.
As with Italy in 2004, I was determined to finish everything while away rather than bring back a pile of half-finished pieces. Again, the long views à la Turner were my subjects, rather than close-up details à la Sargent.
"Torniamo all'antico, sarà un progresso" --Guiseppe Verdi
[Let us return to the past -- that will be progress]Click on the images in the index block or scroll through the images below
The trip ended in Heidelberg, Germany
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The scale of the religious buildings in Istanbul, and the congestion on the streets, including the curiosity and/or salesmanship of the citizenry, makes painting a challenge, to say the least. We stayed at the tiny Naz Wooden House Inn in Sultanahmet, partly because its roof terrace offered a view of the big mosques and the Bosphorus. A splendid view. Ever since art school, I had wanted to see the Aya Sofia mosque, aka Haghia Sophia, the enormous converted church dating from Justinian's reign in the 6th century AD. It did not disappoint. The watercolour attempts to show it looming above the modest wooden buildings of the old town.
[No pencil; cadmium yellow wash to block out the shadows; mostly painted wet on wet with the sky painted around the "negative space" minarets; details added as the paper dried]
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The "Blue Mosque" looms above the Sultanahmet streets of sagging, dilapidated unpainted wooden buildings. I can't think of a place where the opulence of a church or mosque contrasts so sharply with its neighbours. These streets, called I think the Akbiyik Sok, are a backwater off the well-maintained Sultanahmet streets of hotels, restaurants and shops nearby, and are hidden below the huge retaining wall of the mosque.
But nevertheless, from the roof terrace of our hotel, it didn't make a good picture. It looks both down and up, and is neither a good picture of the mosque nor of the "slum" (this is the second watercolour I tried); the pencil drawing of the street below worked much better).
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October 19, 2005, 8 am: looking the other way (south) from the roof terrace of the Naz Wooden House Inn toward the Bosphorus, which widens out on the right into the Sea of Marmara. A single minaret, bristling with loudspeakers for the four-times daily prayers, aggressively protrudes above the modest roofs. The freighter was likely on its way to a port on the Black Sea. Every morning, a few dozen small fishboats positioned themselves between the shore and the main shipping lane.
[This is a dawn picture: an overall wash of manganese blue, reserving only the lighted face of the minaret, with cerulean added (background first) as the paper gradually dried a little. The spray bottle helps to keep the paper slightly wet and soft throughout the painting. Burnt Sienna and ultramarine on wet paper define the silhouetted foreground buildings, but the white minaret is blue in the early morning shadows. The freighter is pure ultramarine.]
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Ephesus, near Selçuk on the "Asia Minor" (Aegean) coast, is the fabulous ruined Roman city, better than Troy or Pergamum. I sat on the edge of a wall with a view of the surviving facade of the Library of Celsus and the three arches of the Gate of Mazaeus and Mitridates, two former slaves of the Emperor Augustus. The low morning light (October 22) created a horizonal rhythm of shadows to complement the vertical rhythm of the orphaned columns.
[No pencil -- I did a pencil drawing in the Moleskine book on site and painted the picture that evening in the hotel room in Kusadasi; cadmium yellow underpainting of the background hill and all the shadowed areas in the foreground, with detailed reserved as "negative space". The shadow colours are mostly a mix of sepia and ultramarine, with cerulean added in some places.]
A few weeks later, near the end of the trip, we found ourselves in Como, Italy, at the Museo Civico (it's a long story). There was an exhibition honouring the centenary of the death of archaeologist Alfonso Garovaglio, "la sapienza del lago," displaying among other artifacts his sketchbooks from trips through the Middle East and "Persia" 125 years ago. They are small books with grid lines, drawn with a very sharp pencil. It was intriguing to see this man's drawings, supplementing the photographic documentation on the expedition, and the sorts of details he was recording to aid his work.
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The highlight of Ephesus is probably the Great Theatre, dating from Hellenistic times but expanded during the reign of Emperor Claudius. It could (and can) seat 25,000. I was fascinated by the view from about 2/3 of the way up, in the cheap seats, along the Arcadian Way with its line of columns toward the long-ago silted-up ancient harbour -- the bay at the mouth of the small Kaystros river. The hill on the left has a ruined tower and fortress, in which St. Paul was allegedly imprisoned after his lecture at the theatre*
The photographs we take on trips distort space. Photographs always look so vast, with too much foreground and a compressed middleground and background, unless you use a telephoto, in which case they're too tight. They are wonderful for capturing detail in towns, or the curiosities of the modern roadside, but never give me a sense of depth, or the feeling of height or the way a landscape fits together. So a drawing like this -- a bird's-eye view with annotations -- is a more accurate memory.
*Note from Stephanie Gould: The references for St. Paul would be: 1 Corinthians 15:32 (uncertain whether this is a referenceÊto the riot of the silversmiths at Ephesus, "the first recorded instance of hostility to the Christians exhibited by Gentiles"-- John L. McKenzie, S.J., Dictionary of the Bible, New York: MacMillan Publishing Co., 1965). All of 1Corinthians was written from Ephesus. And there is also The Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Ephesians in the New Testament.
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Kusadasi is the Turkish port near Selçuk and Ephesus. It is a garish, modern place with a nice beach and lots of the resort accoutrements that draw hedonistic budget tourists from Germany and Britain to the Aegean and Mediterranean. From Istanbul, we had booked into the Hotel Ilayha on the esplanade, but found ourselves in a room facing toward the town, which gave me the opportunity to reflect on the country's major preoccupation.
The boat leaves daily from Kusadasi to Samos, one of the Dodecanese islands that are part of Greece in spite of being within sight of the Turkish coast.
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Samos is a large, quite green, pretty island, a gentle eternal-summer place. We landed from Turkey at the port of Vathi, aka Samos Town, and took a pensione, called "Dreams," for a few days. One day we rented a motor scooter in order to get out a ways along the coast, and to get to the viewpoint above the town to sketch it. The "Express Apollon" is the ship waiting at the dock, which we took overnight from Samos to Piraeus (the port of Athens).
(Below) on one day, we took the local bus across the island to Pythagoreo, renamed recently for its famous native son, the mathematician. In the absence of an interesting view, I succumbed to the fishboat cliché.
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The ship left Samos in the late afternoon and by the time it stopped at Ikaria it was already dark. In the 2nd class lounge, Greek families camped out for the night. As wealthy foreigners, we had a cheap windowless cabin, to which we retired after we had eaten the spanikopitas, drunk the wine, and sketched the snoozers.
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The Acropolis in Athens, from the roof terrace of the Hotel Adonis in Plaka, the old part of the city which, until a century ago, was all there was. Today Athens is home to about 4 million of Greece's 11 million citizens.
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Lykavittos Hill seen from the Acropolis at sunrise. We were in the first few on the Acropolis when it opened at 8am on October 26, just after Greece had reverted to Standard Time. So we were there to witness Greek soldiers raising the flag and singing the national anthem when the sun finally rose and bathed the Parthenon in golden light (no I didn't paint it--I took a photo). Lykavittos is the highest of the Athens hills, a wooded island in the midst of the city. On the drawings I did that morning from the Acropolis, I wrote "endless sea of sunlit white/yellow/pink buildings" to dry to define the extraordinary sight of the city extending for miles in every direction. All concrete, all golden in the mix of sunlight and smog, a creamy colour that perhaps you could only get precisely with oils. In the foreground of the image, the red roofs and random layout define the old district of Plaka.
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Another pencil sketch of Athens, of the Agora -- the former market area -- on the slopes of the Acropolis. I was surprised by how extensive ancient Athens is, and how it sits like a tranquil island in the midst of the chaotic modern city.
