Praia Moçambique, clouds, paths

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 Praia Moçambique, clouds, paths   AVAILABLE

 oil on card, 26 x 28 cm

 

Praia Moçambique, clouds, paths - detail

Rain spitting, but otherwise an enjoyable session.

That sad atmosphere is so Ardizzone.

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A Moroccan Adventure: Taroudant

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Gates, oil on card, 12.5 x 12.5   available

Taroudant is a nice old town with a leafy central square, in which snake charmers and story tellers appear at night. It`s well preserved with gates and walls almost intact, and a fine old ksar. As with the other places I saw in Morocco the mosques did not really stand out. There appears to be a standard form, with a square tower and a cupula, and this was repeated wherever I went.

 A lane, oil on card, oil on card, 12.5 x 15.5 cm  SOLD

               

One could pass a lifetime happily painting just shops in Morocco.

 Toilet attendant, oil on card, 12 x 14 cm  SOLD

This picture, above, is quite in the vein of Ardizzone, the British illustrator, whose sketchbooks are so lively.

A street along the walls, oil on card, 14 x 15 cm  SOLD

 A quiet street, oil on card, 15.5 x 13.5 cm

Wasteland, housing, oil on card, 12.5 x 15.5 cm

The city is expanding with building work here and there both inside and on the outskirts.

 Argan tree, oil on card, 12 x 15 cm  SOLD

The locals use bicycles a lot, whizzing past quite fearsomely in the narrow streets. I hired an old roadster and went on a little wander out of town. The landscape undulates nicely with olive groves.

A view of some tree, oil on card, 12.5 x 13 cm - unavailable

 An avenue, oil on card, 12.5 x 15 cm

 A view from the walls, oil on card, 15 x 13.5 cm  unavailable

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 Thanks

I must thank the kind Moroccan gentleman, whose name I shamefully forget, who bought me dinner and breakfast when he saw that my bank card was consumed by a cash machine and I thought the world was about to end. And I must also thank  Martin and Rea from Germany, who gave me cash to get me through the weekend, and took me for dinner too, and were delightful company besides. And thanks, of course, to my parents for wiring me some money and thus saving my skin.

Moral: have kind parents, or, when traveling, carry some cash, and never depend entirely on plastic.

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To see or buy paintings please visit this gallery:

 ROSE ISSA PROJECTS

82 Great Portland Street London W1W 7NW 

T 0207 602 7700. T 0207 323 1710

 E info@roseissa.com

The Ocean; The Middle East

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The Ocean, oil on card, 14.8 x  11.5cm     available

Painted down on Beiramar Avenue.

It was the sort of shimmering weather that Ardizzone loved to paint- an aesthetic lineage that spins delightfully back through Whistler to Velázquez and Titian (there is that wonderful nautical Titian,  Perseus and Andromeda in the glorious Wallace Collection- I used to enjoy going there in my lunch hours and feeling doomed).

What I like about the Wallace Collection is that I don't get the feeling there that the curators are trying to teach me anything: wheras if I go to, say to any of the Tates, I feel bombarded with notices, explanations, often horribly written and very partial.

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I am thinking about a Middle East trip for late January or February. I'd like to go to Syria again but the state there has murdered to many people there recently that this would probably be unwise.

The big green hill; travel sketching; USA trip

The big green hill, oil on card, 11 x 8.5 cm

A heavy day; my mood awful throughout.

Beautiful heathland in Lagoa, under threat of suburbanisation but still a pleasant place to escape- the smell of the damp grass very pleasant and larks and butterflies everywhere.

I thought of Leonard Cohen's words from, "True Love Leaves No Traces," as I worked:

As the mist leaves no scar

On the dark green hill

So my body leaves no traces

On you, and never will

Through windows in the dark

The children come, the children go

Like arrows with no targets,

Like shakles made of snow

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A couple of days ago I passed the morning reading through an exhibition catalogue of Edward Lear's watercolours, painted on his travels: I have the idea of doing much the same on my USA trip, which is still in it's embyro stages (any help/ advice gratefully accepted: I'm especially interested in linking up with other painters in the USA, and the possibility of showing work and ideally selling some to help pay for the trip).

What is delightful about Lear is that his work is so closely tied to his experience, and even if conpositionally the pictures are often using the jaded formats of Lorrain or Poussin, it's possible to access his personality through his handling of pencil and wash.

Sketchbook work is often so; I have previously mentioned Ardizzone here, I might also mention Zymunt Turkiewicz's "Montecassino" , a very immediate album of drawings illustrating the Polish fores assault on the german stronghold in Italy (pub. 1944) and the drawing produced by Mervyn Peake as an official War Artist.