Cruising through the Panama Canal

George Town, Cayman Islands

Mixed media, including typewriter correction fluid (remember that stuff?)

©2010 Charlene Brown

This is the time of year cruise ships shift from their southern to northern routes, and I’ve just had a wonderful three weeks on one of these ‘repositioning’ cruises – a truly spectacular series of locations for ‘on location’ painting. We started in Tampa, Florida and made our first stop in the delightful city of George Town on Grand Cayman. – where we arrived, along with three other cruise ships, on the last big day of the Caribbean cruise season. Although Georgetown gets close to 1000 cruise ships every year, they don’t yet have a dock big enough to accommodate any of them and we all went ashore in tenders (actually our ships’ lifeboats) two of which I’ve included in my painting. After the Caymans there was one stop in Colombia, a fascinating transit of the Panama Canal, several stops in Costa Rica and Mexico, San Diego, and finally Victoria, where we disembarked within sight of our condominium (Yes!) I’ll be painting larger versions of a few of the watercolour sketches I completed on deck and in various jungles, beaches and archaeological sites, and will post them in the next couple of weeks.