Back from Chile

16 from my Chilean trip.

Back after a week escape from this little apartment, from teaching English and rotting. 

Overall, I'm very happy with the trip. Chile is beautiful and fairly well organised. Santiago is elegant and comfortable to work in: Valparaiso is rather slummy, but is full of architectural interest.

 It was a pity that it rained so much on my first couple of days, restricting me to working from cafes or  the eaves of buildings, but I was able to do a couple of still lives on the worst days.

I stayed in hostels, which offer the strangest of communities: gap-year British teenagers, American and Canadian loners, Australians on extraordinarily long world trips, Germans sitting alone, and a fair smattering of friendly French. The atmosphere is very friendly: easy come, easy go.

I feel sufficiently inspired to contemplate a longer trip to Bolivia.

More carriers for Chile

 

It's very nice to paint these carriers rapidly and simply after painting more complex landscapes.

Cambirela

Cambirela, oil on card, 10 / 8 cm 

Painted a few days ago. One of a series. The orange ground works quite happily.

 

Praia Moçambique, May

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Praia Moçambique, May, oil on card, 16 x 14.5 cm  AVAILABLE

Experimenting with a larger scale, which gives much more freedom of movement and allows more variety in stroke size.

I haven't painted from the motif for a few days and it feels very nice to get back to looking at the world instead of my own thoughts.

I'll try to do a run of larger pictures in Chile.

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Carriers for Chile

 

 

The title of this entry suggests a charity campaign but actually it's about my new, larger carriers for painting pochades in Chile.

 I'll be working on a wider range of scales on this trip from  about 18 / 21 cm downwards. Generally speaking the bigger pictures haven't worked out as well as the smaller for me because of something to do with the something related to concentration and speed, or perhaps merely how I have become accustomed to working.

Graffitti

 

Graffitti painted on the walls of an electrical substation in Corrego Grande.

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If you know the artist's name, please let me know so I can credit them.

Looking up

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Sometimes all you have to do is...look up!