Another trip to Chile?: Patagonia

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From the Stamford Library Series Map, 1912

Patagonia, and deciding where to go

The area is so vast, it seems almost an arrogance to attempt to visit and claim to be painting it.

 I`ve enjoyed the containment of my picture series: attempting in various series to explore places, often with re-visits. Ergo, I`ve been attempting to revisit places to augment existing sets (especially New York, Peru, and Scotland) and hesitant about beginning new sets.  

Revisiting a place is fascinating, making one extremely conscious of the extent to which ones subjective attitudes affected previous visits- what seems strange no longer is, what was grand now bores, and what strikes one as banal on first sight becomes fascinating with later visits. And there are seasonal changes too. Also, initial visits disproportionately involve a tick-boxing of tourist sights, which is time consuming, and just making sense of its layout, figuring out how to get from the hotel to the central square, and so forth. 

But it is nice to feel that I am extending myself at least a little, so when I went to Chile I decided to visit the area around Araucania and a little south, believing that this (admittedly timid) exploration would provide sufficient new inspiration. Indeed this was the case.

So perhaps the thing is to get to Puerto Montt then continue down the Carretera Austral (Southern Highway) stopping here and here on the way, and ending in O`Higgins. That`s 1200 km. It still seems overambitious, but provides at least some of the notion of a containment that I find so necessary, and avoids too much travel by boat, which I detest.

This site below seems to contain all the information one might need to plan a trip: 

https://www.worldlyadventurer.com/planning-a-trip-to-patagonia/

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A trip to Chile: Santiago

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Marin, Bario Italia, oil on card, 21.5 x 25 cm - available

Santiago

I stayed in Barrio Italia, a neighborhood of turn of the century villas and more recent, terribly over-sized blocks, which have an "anyplace" quality. However, the neighborhood is quite attractive in a self effacing way, with tree lined avenues and some small cafes. My picture is from one such street. 

However, there is a problem in Santiago, notably air pollution. Pollution is so bad that after a few hours wandering around I started to develop cold symptoms- a runny nose, a headache and watering eyes. The city could be quite a good cycling city as it is fairly flat but only if they find a way of dramatically improving air quality.

The centre of the city has rather been taken over by protest. There are anarchist posters, some rather striking, around the university but the monuments around the art museum are also heavily defaced and the effect is not attractive. 

Talking generally, almost all graffiti is profoundly depressing: the blunt egoism of the maker, the imposition on public space, the destruction of architecture, the sense of lawlessness that it creates and, usually, its usual utter mediocrity.

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A trip to Chile: Puerto Montt and Puerto Varas

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Puerto Varas, motorcyclist, oil on card, 23.5 x 23.7 cm unavailable

Puerto Montt and Puerto Varas

Puerto Montt is a ghastly place: quite filthy, with abominable architecture. It straggles round a bay then crawls over some hills behind. The place reminded me of Brazil in its crappiness but it has colder weather. The shops are full of rubbish and everything is covered in graffiti. Unhealthy young men hover along the sea promenade like so many stray dogs.

The buildings of most interest- the unusual wooden neoclassical cathedral, and the Gothic church above the town- are both inaccessible: the first because it has been boarded up to avoid damage from the ongoing protests (as have almost all the major buildings, giving a wartime atmosphere to the place); the second because it is in the grounds of a private school and, no, the porter does not have a key to allow access. There is also a colourful theatre, but it was closed.

In the town square was a rock band making a brutish noise. I couldn't find anywhere trustworthy to eat so I went to the Macdonalds. Yes, I appreciate that some might find irony in that sentence.  The windows had, of course, been boarded up, so it was like sitting in the hold of a ship. There were a few black people there and I thought that the town had many more black people than I had seen in other places in Chile. 

Later that evening I went to small concert in the art centre which was nicely performed by some hippies, including a pretty singer with a prominent overbite. I wondered how such people could live in Puerto Montt, they seemed so refined with their cellos and mandolins . There were eight people in the band and eight in the audience, including me.

It was dark after the concert and I was worried about getting robbed- like many ports the town has this underlying atmosphere of violence. Besides, protesters, masked and dressed in black, had begun burning stuff in the town square- a filthy smoke drifted about. 

To get around the town you can use shared taxis which you flag down in the street, and I took one back to my bed and breakfast.which was in a slummy area above the town, an area desolate with rubbish strewn here and there and where some stunted trees suffered ceaselessly under a continual wind. My bed and breakfast was run by a couple who were at first solicitous and friendly, then over-solicitous and over friendly, to the point where I began to feel oppressed at breakfast. Anyway, these taxis feel more intimate than buses, and stop where the passengers ask, so you end up sensing this closeness with the others in the car as you hear their voices softly give instructions to the driver and discover where they live. 

Somewhat disturbed by Puerto Montt, I chose to spend the next day in Puerto Varas, a much smaller and considerably more upmarket town on a lake just to the north. I went by bus, as did an evangelical preacher who stood at the front of the bus preaching the entire fifty minute journey.

Well, Puerto Varas is not especially interesting for more than an hour. And all the restaurants there are extortionate. In one of them I ordered an extremely expensive sandwich from a pimpled adolescent with an apathetic manner.  But the lake views in Puerto Varas are pleasant, and I did a good painting and spoke to some Danish people.

I know it sounds weird but I must confess that although I found Puerto Montt vile in many ways and wouldn't recommend it to anyone, it did impact me in a peculiar way akin to affection. I am drawn to shabby awful places, I don't know why. 

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A trip to Chile: Valdivia

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Valdivia, a residential street, oil on card, 23.5 x 28.6 cm

(picture since damaged and discarded)

Valdivia is rather a jewel, hilly, with lovely coloured iron buildings and a beautiful river. There isn`t much to do there, really, but it`s very nice to wander around in. I stayed in a very nice place which with it`s high ceilings and old wooden fittings, sometimes brightly painted, reminded me of interiors in Edinburgh. The weather was cool.

 The town is quite friendly.

My picture takes something from children`s book illustration. The town has sometimes a certain toy-town feel.

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Thanks to Eugenia for chaperoning me in Valdivia.

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A trip to Chile: Melipeuco, part 4, a road

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Melipeuco, a road, an itinerant, oil on card, 29 x 23.5 cm SOLD

One of the most successful of the trip- though I must say that I`m happy with the work overall. There`s a big van Gogh influence here, of course, and maybe also something of Gillies. 

It`s funny how sometimes pictures just come together, at other times the thing limps along. It`s quite unpredictable, even after years of working.

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A trip to Chile: Melipeuco, part 3, late afternoon

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Melipeuco, late afternoon, oil on card, 21.5 x 24.5 cm - sold

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A trip to Chile: Melipeuco, part 2, a mountain

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Melipeuco, a mountain, oil on card, 28 x 23.7 cm

(picture damaged and discarded)

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A trip to Chile: Melipeuco, part 1, a misty day

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Melipeuco, trees and shrubbery, oil on card, 23.4 x 19.4 cm  unavailable

Melipeuco,a misty day, oil on card, 18 x 24.6 cm

These are the first from Melipeuco, which is a small town, close to a national park and not very far from Argentina. I`d come here again: it`s varied and pleasant. 

The weather was perfect. I had a bike to get around on.

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A trip to Chile: Pucón, part 3, views just outside the town; travel and oil painting

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 Pucón, a hill, farms, oil on card, 24 x 30 cm- available through No 31 Gallery

This is one of the more successful of the trip. The larger scale allows for greater fluency. 

Oil painting and travel

A month trip, two sessions per day, is a good concentrated period to work through ideas about painting. It's a good time to learn about a place. I find that a longer trip tends to lead to some sense of exhaustion, a need for recuperation, for experiences to sediment and pass through filters. I work very well if the weather and location are kind. But I have never extended the trips beyond six weeks. 

There is also the lugging things around factor. You need no more clothes for two months than you do for a week. But with the paintings you will need to take more protective carriers so wet pictures can be transported safely. Oil paintings such as mine, which are thinly painted and pretty well without impasto need to be packed individually until a week has passed and then they can be packed together. Inevitably something gets damaged- it's wise to incorporate something of Wabi Sabi into your mental armory.

For me making art is better done alone. Human social needs and creativity can combine in performance arts such as theatre. But, for me, with landscape painting- at least the romantic landscape tradition that I am involved with- social needs and creative necessities sit in different zones. But it would be nice to have company at mealtimes, of course.

I had a thought that going all the way down, adding another month to reach Patagonia, might have rewarded me. The long thin shape of Chile cries out for a linear trip from hot desert at the north down to icy mountain in the south. But the costs would have become hideous: Chile is not a super-cheap option like Peru or Bolivia: a single room in in a budget place is about 25$. 

A separate Patagonia trip is on the cards, however.

 Pucón, a lane with children, oil on card, 28 x 21.7 cm -discarded

In retrospect, I find this picture a little overworked. I liked it at the time and perhaps I'll come back to liking it.

 Pucón, big blue hill, mist, oil on card, 19.8 x 23 cm discarded

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A trip to Chile: Pucón, part 2, from above

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 Pucón, oil on card, 23.5 x 28.5 cm- available

Pucón, a neighborhood, oil on card,  19.3 x 23.5 c- available

Painting from above

One enjoyable trick is to steal from medaeval art to place elevations and ground level views on the  birds eye view street plan: This can lead to enjoyable tensions.

The second picture here is very good, having a brisk energy about it.

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A trip to Chile: Pucón, part 1

Description

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Pucón 

Pucón. volcano, lake, oil on card, 23.9 x 28.7cm   AVAILABLE

Like Villarrica, Pucón is a resort town on the lake. But it is more extensive with more of an infrastructure.

I'd have preferred somewhere a bit wider in both cases, more rural. I had somehow imagined that these towns would be buried, hidden and that I'd arrive as if the first to reach for generations, but everything here is quite polished and you might even imagine yourself to be somewhere in the USA at times. I confess that I often had a feeling of unexcitement in Chile, as if the place were determined not to get under my skin.

Well, it became very hot, and it rained. 

But I worked very well, with a good rhythm. When painting goes like that life is pretty much as good as it can be.

Travel painting

One of the things about travel painting is how it forces ones critical judgments to become rapid. One has less time to find subject matter and acquaint oneself with it. And one has less time to make judgments about ones own work. 

This might lead to weaker or more conservative work- more conservative because one might be less willing to take risks. But I think for me the result is simply that I work with more energy and make better use of my time. I think there is something in the idea that if you give a man an hour to do a job, he'll take an hour, if you give him two hours to complete a job ...and so forth. Time limitations concentrate energies. 

Another thing to thnk about is how creativity is about working with that you have at hand. So a time limitation can make you far more aware of the diverse possibilities of a given set of tools, and in the case of a lanscapist, also the possibilities in any specific view.

The world is essentially an interesting place, and creative responses are not necessarily richer in dramatic locations. I would say, however, that variety is always good: a diversity of landscapes and a diversity of media with which to interpret them. But I add, at risk of contradicting myself, that some places just seem to be more inspiring than others.

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A trip to Chile: Villarrica, part 4

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Villarrica, blue river, oil on card, 24 x 28.7 cm

Villarrica, a landscape with a river, oil on card, 24 x 28.7 cm  - available

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A trip to Chile: Villarrica, part 3

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This pair from Villarrica was painted in the woods by the river-one of the few places, in the unusual heatwave, to offer shade.

The two paintings represent two stylistic approaches that I have been playing with over the last years, the former more detailed and constructed of smaller strokes, the second made from fewer, larger areas, and with much thicker strokes.

One reason for the second style is that it is a reaction to the former, which can degenerate into fussiness. The fussiness happens when the light shifts on the motif- and as a result I unconsciously start repainting various areas, and therefore the painting loses the compositional objectives it had the start. To resolve the resulting  confusions I  simplify the composition using larger brushes. 

Another reason for this style is that I am conscious that pastoral painting can easily become twee. This awareness makes me want to use a more forceful style  to prevent this from happening, and which I call the blocky style and which produces pictures that are a bit more like posters.

In contemporary art twee, or any sweetness is an anathema. This is connected to the idea that artists should participate in (and ideally lead) revolutionary movements and these have to be utterly poker-faced and cold and aggressive to achieve their objectives. There are one or two exceptions, such as Klee.

Villarrica, forest path, oil on card, 24 x 28.2 cm

Villarrica, oil on card, 28.7 x 23.7 cm  unavailable

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A trip to Chile: Villarrica, part 2

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A trip to Chile: Villarrica, part 2

Villarrica itself isn`t interesting. But it sits on the lake and has beautiful views of the volcano.

So here are two paintings of the same volcano, one right after the other, from a slight change of position. But I cant tell you which was first... 

The idea of self-consciously working in series is a recurrent theme of modern painting, linking Cezanne and Monet. For a painter, it can be very satisfactory. You resolve basic problems such as composition and can focus and more subtle factors such as light, or colour changes, and you have  a run of pictures for comparison- rather pleasing. 

Villarrica volcano no. 1, oil on card, 33.5 x 19.5 cm- unavailable

Villarrica volcano no. 2, oil on card, 34 x 19.6 cm unavailable

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A Trip to Chile: part 1; Temuco and Villarrica

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Chile

My trip was shaped like this:

Florianopolis- Santiago- Temuco - Villarrica - Pucon - Melipeuco - Valdivia - Puerto Montt - Santiago - Florianopolis

Temuco

I flew into Temuco, a somewhat nondescript town, albeit one full of curious characters, most of them seedy. The area around the bus station is especially full of such people and they sell vegetables, bric a brac and probably themselves along its urine stenching streets. I strongly recommend a visit. 

Seedy places in Chile are the only places that I've come across in Latin America where chips are sold as a snack fo you to walk away with. They are sold in a choice of minuscule bags at 700, 800, or 900 Chilean Pesos (900 fits about 15 chips, so for 700 I suppose you receive about five). The chips are oily and flaccid like mysterious body parts. You might not like them. They also sell them in Puerto Montt, which is very seedy too.

There is a very good art shop in Temuco.  

Villarrica

But the first place I did any work in was Villarrica, which isn't seedy at all. There was a heat wave so it was pleasant to work in the woods by the river. This first painting is very good. 

Villarrica, gardens viewed from the river, oil on card, 21.7 x 24.5 cm  - available

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Packing for Araucania

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Medium sized case, carriers

Travelling to Araucania

I`m trying to keep weight and nuisance down. 

 I calculate that I can take 32 card pieces to paint on, in the very unlikely event that all the 32 painting sessions that my four weeks in Chile allows are successful.

 I carry these in 4 carriers. The problem with using oil paints is they need at least three days to dry. That's one reason for not staying anywhere for less than a week-  to allow any pictures the time they need to dry before packing between different painting spots. I have thought about using acrylics but I find them nasty in colour and finish.

As things stand, I`m painting in three places: Villaricca, Pucon and Melipueco, though I  I shall perhaps wander down to Puerto Montt for the last few days in Araucania.

The paints and so on fit into this case, along with various other bits and pieces. It`s tight but it`s just about ok. The larger case is cumbersome. 

My trip isn't until after Christmas, but I like to plan things in advance and do things in a good time, unhurriedly. The Brazilian way of doing everything last minute appalls me.

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My Chile trip: Araucania

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Melipeuco

I have added Melipeuco to the list of places in which I will stay. It's close to a national park, called Conguillio.

I think the nature and scenery there might no be so different from here, albeit with snow covered volcanoes and more lakes.

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My summer trip: Chile

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Araucania

Chile: Araucania

There is a direct flight from Florianopolis to Santiago, and it is considerably cheaper to go there than  Quito. So I shall make my way there then hop down to Temuco and the lakes (Villarrica and Pucon).  It is a shame to, again, jilt Ecuador, but I have to be careful with my finances.

The scenery is rather find with volcanoes, forests and beautiful lakes, and I think it will have a pleasant temperature and a fine place to work.

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I reread my piece on Santiago from three years ago and it seems prescient. 

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Santiago

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Graffiti in  Barrio Brasil

Santiago

I immediately felt depressed in the crowded city. Indeed, I felt that I had made a mistake to come, the place filled me with such an oppressive greyness, the sky grey and everyone dressed in grey or dark blue or black and they shuffled about like zombies. The service style was anonymous, and the goods expensive and there was that weird sadness everywhere, as if the place and its inhabitants were silently undergoing some  terrible, nameness calamity. 
The city is like a composite of European architecture, all very respectable and looking the part of a capital and rather dull. If you wanted to make a film noir featuring an unspecific city then it would serve well as the Andes are not visible on dull days. I had a dismal kebab. Looking for an art shop I went into a mall of several stories containing shops servicing alternative culture:  tattoo parlours, game shops, t-shirt sellers, jewellers and so forth..  But there is as much that was restricted about this alternative culture as the "official" culture it seeks to oppose: its symbols, which are occult clichés or taken from the marijuana smoking culture of Bob Marley, or the world of Hell's Angels, are tired and as blandly international as the products in high street stores .

The metro was unbelievably crowded. I returned to my place a hostel called La Casa Roja, a huge mansion with a pleasant social atmosphere in Barrio Brasil, a likeable neighbourhood of nineteenth century squares and avenues.

I spent a day wandering round the museums. Particularly satisfactory was the Museum of Pre-Colombian Art, which features these magnificent sculptures:

According to the Pre-Colombian Art Museum Website: These remarkable wooden statues were placed on top of tombs in ancient Mapuche cemeteries. They reflect the spirit (am) of those buried there and are intended to assist them in their journey to the afterlife. Chiefs and great warriors were sent to the East after death, to roam among the volcanoes of Kalfumapu, the “blue land.” All others went to the West, to eat bitter potatoes beyond the sea.

I enjoyed the Museum for Contemporary Art, especially these two pieces:

The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, Carlos Isamitt, 1940, oil on canvas, 76.4 x 85.8 c

San Fernando Alley, Juan Francisco González,  oil on canvas, 31.2 x 41 cm

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