The first time I visited Cyprus was almost 20 years ago, and as I stepped off the plane, it felt like I’d come home. Something feels really familiar in the smell of hot dusty air. There were sounds and senses that did not seem at all foreign despite being 2000 miles from the place I’ve lived all my life.
Over the years I’ve been back many times, and never lost this home from home feeling.This year I wangled a way to spend 3 weeks here, and had time to really soak myself into the surroundings: the rich vivid colours & heady scents of bougainvillea & jasmine – the sand between my toes – luxuriating like the the cats that roam and loll around every corner.
But 3 weeks is a long time away from my studio routines, so I bundled up some necessaries for the trip and took a bit of time every morning to move some color about.
These are colors I chose to take (mostly Daniel Smith’s watercolors – decanted into half pans in a little tin box).
I second guessed my choice after I swatched them out here – why so many colors so similar? but as it turned out they were just what I needed, vivid blues & magentas amid the warm stony earth tones..
I’m not much of a landscape painter – my camera is for catching actual views – leaving my sketchbook as the place for playing with ideas.
The ideas I found myself playing with was the similarities and echoing patterns, repeating undulations, the ripples in the water with the curve of the waves, the textures in rocks and stones, the shifting shapes of shadows in the early autumn breeze. Mixing and remixing, folding ideas together into an endless series of permutations.
Re-entry
I feel I’m like returning a bit at a time after a long trip away – this time it took almost a week to really gather myself together into one place. What eased the transition was the pages in this book that overlapped the geography. The patterns of the travels merged into the patterns of usual daily doings & the edges between the two worlds blurred.
Catch this month’s newsletter to see a flip through of these pages to find out where this little collection of images leads next!
