Report from Pompeii

(Click on picture to enlarge)

Vesuvius from Pompeii

Watercolour and crayon

©2011 Charlene Brown

We left Lago di Garda planning to get as far south as we could so as to have an easy day’s drive to Sorrento the next day.  Here is what happened instead… We found a perfect place overlooking Lago di Balsena, quite by accident. Driving right through the town we’d planned to find a B+B in because nothing was quite right, we continued on only because there was nowhere to turn around… and there it was, hanging off the top of a cliff!  We had our own huge balcony with a panoramic view of the sunset over a couple of islands, and the place had a great restaurant too. As my husband said, over the best scaloppini I’d ever tasted, “They’re going to have to come up with a pretty awful breakfast to get me to leave this place after only one night!” We did in fact stay an extra day before heading south again.

We by-passed Rome and Naples and sped directly down the Autostrada del Sole to the base of the Bay of Naples… and what a horrific traffic malfunction the whole Sorrento Peninsula turned out to be! We discovered we had an air re-circulater in the AC, so managed to avoid asphyxiation in the tunnels, but the air outside wasn’t much better, what with all the scooters, trucks, and tour buses, with everyone else operating on the flying wedge principle.  And that was a Thursday! What was the weekend going to be like? We not only didn’t stay there, we didn’t even slow down much as we did a U-turn and headed back to Pompeii.

Pompeii was pretty impressive, especially with Vesuvius still looming in the distance. I took lots of pictures, but no painting as we headed back north after just one day. 

I just painted ‘Vesuvius, from Pompeii’ this week. using a couple of those photos. It reminds me of a picture of the Jebel Akhdar at a similar ruin at Ptolemais in Libya.  I wrote about that one a couple of years ago. 

Report from Venice

 A quiet corner of the Grand Canal

Watercolour and crayon

©2011 Charlene Brown

Continuing our European Grand Tour, which began with my Report from Prague  ... We arrived in Italy on May 18, and stayed one night in Cortina, where we woke up to find everything covered in snow – ironic, in that the reason for heading to Italy from Sweden was so we could be sure it would be warm. The snow slowed our descent to the autostrada for the journey south – not because there was any left on the road by the time we got going, but because as the cloud lifted, the glistening white mountains were so sensational that we had to stop anywhere the road was wide enough to take pictures! (Remember, this was in the dark days before affordable digital cameras, and you couldn’t just shoot continuously from a moving vehicle in the hope of getting a few good pictures).

We headed down to Lago di Garda to stay for a few days, arriving to see windsurfers crossing the lake at horrifying speeds propelled by gale-force winds! Oddly enough, the next day we were having lunch at San Zeno di Montagnes high above the mirror-like surface of the lake, watching about fifty tiny sailboats trying to have a race… Or maybe it was a synchronized sailing display, because that’s all they did for the three hours we managed to make lunch last – line up in various directions and hold each position for about fifteen minutes.

One day we left the car in Garda and took a day-trip to Venice, where a gondola ride was included in the tour. This turned out about like you’d expect… Because my husband is so big, it was thought better if we didn’t actually sit together.  So off we went, with the gondolier standing on the left, me sitting on the right, and my husband in the pointy part up front, facing backwards, leaning to the left or right as required to stabilize the whole manoeuvre as we glided beneath bridges or knifed our way through the other two thousand gondolas in operation that day. Actually it was a pretty terrific day all round and because we got there on a train we got a chance to have a look at the vineyards, orchards and fabulous fluorescent red poppies of the Volpolicello region, instead of just the road or the road map.    

Award Nomination!

(click image to enlarge)

Running in the Rockies

Still from computer-painted video

©2010 Charlene Brown

I’ve just learned my computer-painted video, Running around North America,  has been nominated for an award at a student film festival taking place May 14 in Vancouver! 

In the festival listing, I described the making of this video, in a five-day session at the Gulf Islands Film & Television School, as follows:

Animation is an alarmingly slow process, so I was pretty relieved when I realized that by replicating a short Flash animation and compositing this replication with a ‘green screen’ film clip and some paintings I accessed from my blog, I could actually come up with something that ran for more than a couple of seconds…

Report from Kranjska Gora

Triglav National Park, Slovenia

Watercolour postcard

©2000 Charlene Brown

We left Prague May 10 and spent three days getting to Budapest, with stops in Cesky Krumlov (which I painted last year on a virtual repeat visit) and Melk in Austria. We climbed up to the Melk Abbey, an awe-inspiring place, and the most extremely baroque church you could ever hope to find, but my husband didn’t get far inside the place – his hiking boots made so much noise on the polished wood floors he carefully squawked and squealed his way to the back pew and stayed there. 

Besides the expected attractions of Buda and Pest, there was a (then) new place, Szobor Park. Unlike other formerly-communist countries, which have mainly dumped their Soviet-style sculptures, Hungary has gathered them all together in one place, and it’s quite an impressive sight. I mean, some of those hummers are huge!

Heading west after Budapest, we found a wonderful pension, high up in the vineyards and orchards overlooking Lake Balaton –the first time we’d actually followed our plan to just stop whenever we saw a perfect place – and decided to stay a couple of days. While there we visited Heviz, a huge thermal lake, to ‘take the waters,” which we shared with water-lilies, quite a lot of floating moss, algae, a few hundred other people and ducks. Spent three hours floating around contemplating the many flights overhead and trying to agree on which might be EK001, EK035, and EK016 out of Dubai.

When we left Hungary we were unable to obtain any Slovenian money (remember these were the dark days before the Euro was introduced) but proceeded for almost an hour without any difficulty – until we realized we’d been traveling on a toll road! The folks in the tool booth were not interested in our leftover florints.  They would have accepted Austrian schillings, but we only had 18 of them.  DM and SF would also have been okay but supply buried in suitcases somewhere. Tentatively waved an American $5 which they not only accepted with smiles all round, but gave us 645 tolars change! Next booth, shorter road, paid another $5, got 930 tolars change. Obviously this wasn’t going to be enough for a B+B, so when we reached Kranjska Gora (by turning right just before Ljublyjana and heading toward some great-looking mountains) we took the trouble to find a hotel that accepted Visa.

The second day we drove up to Gorski Prelaz Vrsic, the highest pass in the Julian Alps, and the scenery was about the most spectacular we’d ever seen. In our road atlas the road up the pass was white – same colour as your knuckles if you go up it – which apparently indicates a paved path with squared cobblestones on the near-vertical switchbacks. But it was worth it. Finally painted some postcards here, after our triumphal return from the pass, to the thundering beat of The Best of Communism, a CD we picked up at Szobar Park.

Report from Prague

Charles Bridge, Prague

Watercolour and crayon

©2011 Charlene Brown

Over the next couple of months, I will be writing about our “European Grand Tour,” an almost totally unplanned excursion that took place over the same May-June period eleven years ago. The text (running longer than my usual 150 words) for the posts will be based on excerpts from emails we sent at the time. Some of the illustrations will be paintings from postcards I sent, and others, such as ‘Charles Bridge, Prague,’ will be recent paintings based on photos from our trip.

On May 1, 2000, the day after my husband retired from Emirates Airline, we arrived at the Dubai airport at 3 am for a 6 am departure. Suddenly we were tourists, so we took lots of pictures of the splendid new terminal (they’ve built two more since then), Abdulqader Al Rais murals, four-story palm trees made out of gold bricks, and other wonders of Arabia – and the next thing we knew we were at the Volvo factory in Gothenburg (time flies when you’re in shock) Sweden. We got a very complicated briefing on our new car – cruise control, diagnostics, locking, alarms, and some other stuff – and took it for a spin on their test track. A pretty careful spin, as I recall.

The next day, we crossed into Denmark at Helsingor, had a quick look at Hamlet’s castle – it was too cold for anything else – and headed south, crossing into Germany the following day on the ferry from Rodyhavn, where we found the menus printed in Danish, German, and Swedish and managed to order parsnip pie for dinner.  And it was really good!

We then took the scenic route via various computer repair places and the Harz Mountains to Meissen, where we found such a great hotel, with a huge biergarten overlooking this magnificent Medieval city, that we toyed with the idea of just staying there for the two months we’d allotted to this ‘driving into the sunset’ grand tour…

But then we proceeded to Prague, getting lost more than once (remember, this was in the dark days before GPS).  It helped a little, but only a little, when we finally found out that Umleitung (usually abbreviated to an enigmatic ‘U’) means ‘Detour.’ Our new car behaved beautifully, unlike the laptop from hell which we had purchased in order to be able to send emails throughout our trip (remember this was in the dark days before iPhones). Fortunately, one of the wonders of Prague turned out to be an Internet Café, where a lovely young man walked us through the Czech instructions for setting up a Hotmail account.

Another twentieth century flashback

The Fort at Bahla, Sultanate of Oman

Watercolour and crayon

©1996 Charlene Brown

A couple of people have asked if I’m going to post more of the ‘alphabet of art’ series I did for the Khaleej Times youth magazine in Dubai… Yes, there will be a few.  Although I used other Dubai Arts Centre members’ artwork to illustrate many of the letters, several were my own work, and here’s one of them.  No, it wasn’t called ‘B is for Bahla’ – it was ‘A is for Abstract,’ and here’s some of what I said about it:

Art is called abstract if it doesn’t look very much like what it’s supposed to be.  It can be completely non-representational art, which doesn’t look very much like anything at all.  Or it can be a real object or landscape converted into a pattern which may still be a quite recognizable picture of what it’s supposed to be.  Or it can be somewhere in between.

Abstract painting only got started since the invention of photography, when some artists decided to break with the traditions of realism, proportion and perspective. 

One of the ways to create abstract (or semi-abstract) art is to start with reality and ‘abstract’ it. Apparently,Pablo Picasso said, “There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.”  I like that concept, but if I’ve gone to the trouble of going somewhere to paint something, I like to leave in enough ‘reality’ for the location to be recognizable. That’s how I painted The Fort at Bahla.

My postcard arrived this time!

Inukshuk at Whistler

Watercolour postcard

©2011 Charlene Brown

This is the postcard I sent to Pat Reese in the United States – my ‘April’ contribution to the international postcard exchange we joined.  Unlike my March postcard to South Africa, this one actually arrived, and Pat wrote a very nice post about it on A Postcard From My Walk  last week. There’s a new post every couple of days on this blog, and the quality and variety of the artwork is fascinating! Have a look…

I am absolutely thrilled with the three ‘original’ postcards I have received so far.  I’ll be writing about the beautifully detailed card Liz Steele sent me from Australia tomorrow (April 14) and wrote about the other two here and here. 

Virtual Paintout in Japan

Joshin-etsu Expressway

Watercolour and crayon

©2011 Charlene Brown

When I first read that the Virtual Paintout is in Japan this month, I pinpointed Mt. Fuji and found a nearby lake with a blue road (indicating it had been ‘streetviewed’ by the Google cameras) along the shore, with an apparently unobstructed view of Mt Fuji. Sure enough, I found that you can drive for miles along the north shore of Lake Yamanaka with a perfect view of Mt. Fuji, sometimes with a perfect reflection as well, and almost painted this view.  But then, thinking that a lot of other people would be painting somewhere along this road (there were already two when I checked this morning) I set off north of Mt Fuji, until I found this spectacular bridge on the Joshin-etsu Expressway. This toll-road goes through some very rugged terrain including some long tunnels and this stretch is one of the few places where you get a great view in all directions.  Here’s a link to it.