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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