Australian Tourist's
Sketchbook
2001-2002

This part of my art has developed very separately from the studio oils of BC and Australia. It relates much more to the watercolours I did as illustrations for books like Canada A Journey of Discovery, Vanishing British Columbia and Vancouver Remembered. It's all about the pleasure of travelling and recording the landscape I pass through, where the sketchbook (and/or a web-published or book-published image) is the "final use," by which I mean I'm not daubing away merrily with the intention of gathering images for later transposition into larger studio paintings.

While still in my teens, I was inspired by the sumi-e (brush and ink) sketchbooks of the Japanese master Hokusai. At the age of 20, I visited the Louvre and was intrigued by Eugène Delacroix's watercolour sketchbooks from his trip through Morocco in 1832. Ever since I have carried a sketchbook while travelling.

One problem to overcome was the poor quality of the paper in commercial watercolour sketchbooks. The first time I tried to use a commercial watercolour sketchbook was on a trip through France in 1986. The experiment worked poorly, at least in part because of a second problem -- I had not developed the ability to simplify the images and record them in a way that allowed me to finish them effectively from memory. Learning to paint these "pôchades" took more years of practice. 

In 1996, John Atkin offered to bind a sketchbook for me using my favorite watercolour paper: Arches 140-pound cold-pressed. That was the sketchbook published as Canada A Journey of Discovery. Further simplifying the painting process, I began to use a small Winsor & Newton travel paintbox, containing only a dozen colours, and a collapsible Isabey 6202 squirrel-mop travel brush. The Winsor & Newton paintboxes are widely available. I have only been able to get the Isabey brush from Pearl Paint and Daniel Smith in the USA.

A 2005 sketchbook, with the beginnings of a double-page watercolour of the beach at Denman Island, BC

My travel paintbox colours (14 of them): cerulean blue, manganese blue, ultramarine light, Payne's grey, cadmium yellow (a little blob of it), cadmium yellow deep, yellow ochre, olive green, viridian, burnt sienna, burnt umber, sepia and Indian red + rose madder sharing a single tub. Since moving to Australia in 2006, I've replaced the manganese blue with cobalt blue.

A good book on the subjects of outdoor, en plein air painting and watercolour is Sargent Abroad: Figures and Landscapes by Warren Adelson et al (Abbeville Press, 1997), a comprehensive examination of John Singer Sargent's travel paintings executed during the last two decades of his life. I am particularly impressed by the watercolours done with a limited palette dominated by ultramarine and burnt sienna. In the Light of Italy: Corot and Early Open-Air Painting (National Gallery of Art, 1996) examines the artists who moved landscape painting out of the studio in the early 19th century.

During July, 2003, I travelled to Percé in the Gaspésie, at the extreme eastern end of Québec on the Gulf of St. Lawrence, to conduct a week-long seminar on travel painting in watercolours and creating sketchbooks (carnets de voyage et aquarelles) for the Université Laval's International Summer School. The page on Percé has the results and on a linked page the sketches from 2004 and 2005. In 2006 and 2007 I gave the same course, over 4 days, at the Island Mountain Arts Centre in Wells, BC. That summer (2007) I gave two one-day workshops at Enderby, sponsored by the Arts Council.

Largely due to the difficulties of painting in European cities, I have further modified my technique and now often use small annotated pencil sketches as the on-site "plein air" image, then paint as soon as possible after that -- often in a hotel room -- while the colour memory is still fresh in my mind. You can see some of these on the Turkey-Greece page above. I also find that the pencil sketches force me to simplify even further, making them useful for the abstracted oil landscapes I've been doing for the past couple of years. Pencil drawings of people became one of my major activities in 2008 during the Spain-France trip.

I'm contributing to a Travel Painting blog at greggfretheim.blogspot.com/