Sketching Odyssey In The Aegean: A Week In Greece

Tuesday 22nd April

I am heading to Greece to spend a week with nine students from all over the world. They, like me, are keen sketchers, and I will share some of my techniques with them as we explore the hills, valleys and coast of the hidden part of Greece where we’ll be staying.

I’ve brought my husband Marcel along with me. Marcel will be my wing-man, my driver, my fall guy, my companion, and it’s going to be terrific.

Our destination is the Pelion Peninsula, and we’re going to its southern tip. A long drive lies ahead of us, and we’re staying in an airport hotel for the first night. We find it, but it is weird – no suitcase ramps, lights or signs, or anything to suggest it’s a hotel. Inside, there’s one bare desk and fluorescent lighting. The place is deserted save the proprietor, an older man with a bald, shiny bronzed pate and wisps of white hair: he’s a ringer for Tío in Breaking Bad. He shows us our room, throws a sheet and blanket onto the unmade bed, and mutters under his breath (about the lazy chambermaid, no doubt). Marcel is less than pleased about making his bed himself but that aul’ fella isn’t making no bed. The room is clean but very basic, and I would be a little miserable if I were on my own, but instead I laugh at the request I made when I booked, for “a room with a nice view, if possible” and proceed to sleep like a baby.

Wednesday 23rd April

In the morning, I see a sort of construction dumping site outside, near the breakfast room, but a closer look reveals a scrubby patch of grass that’s a beautfiul tangle of wild flowers of every colour.

We set off for our long drive. GPS tells us it’ll take 4 hours 45 minutes, and soon we’re in Kamena Vourla, a few hours north of Athens. In the absence of a specified address, the GPS takes us to a hotel car park. We pass through the large marble lobby – no Tío lookalikes or fluorescent bulbs here – where small boys swarm, all in football clothes. It’s an Easter Holidays soccer academy. We walk straight through the lobby and find ourselves at a giant swimming pool full of splashing children, one or two lifeguards watching. The sea stretches out into the distance just beyond the pool. Parents chill out on the deck, clearly delighted to be able to loll about with their friends while their kids are entertained. Soccer-strip clad young men strut about authoritatively, and I wonder if they can believe their luck to be paid to run about playing soccer with kids. We sit at a table, settle back in the strong sunshine and order coffee. It’s surreal to be speeding up a motorway one minute, and sitting in an advertisement for a holiday resort the next, and we’re thrilled to be there.

Before we hit the road again, Marcel suggests hanging around in Kamena Vourla a bit longer and finding somewhere to have lunch. It’s a good shout, and we find a restaurant situated upon the water’s edge, like everywhere in Kamena Vourla, since the town is a narrow strip between mountain and sea. We have our first Greek meal: grilled sausage, Greek salad and beer, all delicious. A boy of about 10, in soccer clothes, has been roped in to serve the guests, and he carefully carries trays of beer to the customers. A girl of about the same age is pitching in too: I like seeing children working for the family business, if it’s within their capabilities (I wish mine would do a bit more).

We arrive in Lagou Raxi hotel, our destination, at about 6.00pm, and gasp at the view from the terrace, a sweeping vista of the islands and premontories along the coast west of the Pelion peninsula. The host and organiser of the week’s sketching, Sue Wake, greets me warmly and introduces me to the students who’ll be sketching with me this week. Then we have dinner, followed by a nice early night.

Thursday 24th April

The village where Lagou Raxi is situated is called Lafkos. There are two or three hundred residents. You can hop in your car and be there in two minutes, or you can walk along a twisting paved path, cute beyond belief, passing hidden gardens hung with wisteria, and trees of orange blossom, admiring the terracotta rooftops of the houses that flank the hill all the way up to its wooded peak. The path is a labyrinth. One of my students has taken it a few times already and she tells me, “It’s easy to get back to the hotel – all you do is turn leftm then right, then left, then right, all the way until the end.” On the way to the village, the narrow path ends abruptly in a short flight of steps that leads to a square – a prateia – shaded by a canopy of mature plane trees. Small wooden tables are placed cheek by jowl, surrounded by cute chairs painted a sort of mint green. Later, I discover that no homes, shops or tavernas can have any plastic or metal signs or window frames; everything must be made of wood. This might be a headache in terms of maintenance, but it means everything is nice to look at (until the homeowners are holidaymakers who spend just one month of the year there, and cover their home with unsightly plastic sheeting for the other eleven months).

Theme

The theme this morning is to use a waterbrush with dilute watercolour to get a shape, without using pen, then when you’re happy, to trace over the lines with a pen as much or as little as desired. This works very well for some, and doubtless less well for others: it allows you to make a few mistakes and wash them away if the paint is still wet, and if it’s dry and you can’t wash them away, you won’t see them once the sketch has been worked up a bit.

(Marcel and I return later in the evening for a drink. We have a little something to go with it: some kind of triangle fried cheese, some fried bread and fried zucchini. Words cannot express how delicious all of this is. Maybe I am crazy hungry. A family with two little boys sit at a nearby table. We take a photo and send it to the family whatsapp group chat. “Who’s the troll man and the troll baby?” asks our son Paddy. He means they’re trolling our photo, but I take it to mean they look like adorable trolls, and I draw them in quickly with my SketchPocket, which is by my side.)

The afternoon session takes place outside the entrance to Lagou Raxi. This hotel has stunning views on both sides: from the front, over Lafkos and the buildings, and from the back, across the sea towards the eat coast of Greece.

Theme

The theme here is drawing. I have a trick for accurate drawing – as I do for most topics – which involves starting with shape A, estimating where the first line of the adjacent building (or shape) starts in relation to the shape you’ve just completed, and growing the building ever-outwards. It guarantees a nice solid drawing. As with the trick described above. it works for many people – and the rest just haven’t practiced enough!

I nip out first thing in the morning to finish it, because it takes ages to finish a sketch as I like it, and it’s important that I produce sketches that inspire the students.

Friday 25th April

We walk up the dirt track behind the hotel to a tiny chapel along the path. The path is wide but unpaved and very dusty. A little snake lies dead on the path: snakes are very exciting to this wild-animal-obessed Irishwoman, if not all of them (my mother is phobic about snakes, but she’s not Irish and has probably had genuinely frightening encounters with them). Despite feeling a tiny bit squeamish, I take a photo of the snake and draw it later. I look up Greek snakes and it turns out to be a match for a leopard snake, otherwise known as a European rat snake. It’s very small though, and has clearly been taken from us with its entire life ahead of it.

Theme

Today’s theme is “colour blocking”, where you make an amorphous blob of colour, that may or may not represent something in your composition. When it’s dry, you use pen and ink to do some detailed drawing. It’s worked well for me in the past, but I don’t think it worked so well this time. However, I manage to sneak in one of my students sitting at a little round table, and as I go around my students I see some beautiful work. Glorious lines, set free from anxiety by the magic splashes of colour nearby. I don’t know why it (often) works like that, but it does. Something about taking the “blank white page” syndrome away.

The painting on the right, which isn’t very good in my opinion, is a copy of a mural I saw in a church at our next stop, Trikeri. Look at the length of the left arm in the central figure! Someone (me) wasn’t using my very own accurate drawing technique. Now, if only I’d sketched out the figure in watercolour first…

Just before we leave to return to the hotel for lunch, I do a demo on values, and using contrast to make things look sunny. I look at the work of the students and see some convincingly sun-drenched sketches. You can see the silhouette of another of my students in the archway with the ivy everywhere.

On the right is the chapel at Trikeri, our afternoon stop. The chapel has some really stunning murals. They are beautifully and expertly painted. A woman with black hair in a long bob partly pinned back in a clip sweeps the floor in the inner sanctum. The atmosphere is peaceful.

The reason we’re at Trikeri is that our host, Sue, has learned about some traditional dancing that’s going to take place in the town, as part of the local Easter celebrations. She thinks we’ll love it. After a long drive along some truly stunning coastline, we arrive in this very pretty town, and call in first to the church I describe above, and then we wait for the dancing to start.

Theme

The idea for this afternoon from a sketching point of view is to sketch people moving: five of the nine students on the course have purchased a SketchPocket, so they”ll be able to sketch the dancers, ink, watercolour and all, standing up in the crowd. That’s what I do with mine, and I am proud to be able to do it, even if the women I sketch look like Russian dolls come to life.

That said, the women dancing DO look like Russian dolls. They all wear headscarves of warm yellow, frilled white aprons and multi-petticoated skirts. Their skirts are voluminous, like those of Russian dolls. They are heavily made up. And there are small ones, like Russian dolls. They are all dazzling.

What is particularly lovely about the dancers is that all the women in the village seem to be taking part, from the age of about nine up to about 60: I don’t see any VERY elderly women dancing. They form a line, linking hands, and they dance in a slow circle around a central stage in the prateia, where four musicians sing and play instruments. I find the music sounds very Middle Eastern to my uneducated ear. It all seems very natural for the townspeople: their annual Easter celebration, but with everyone taking part. Elderly women in black from head to toe adjust the outfits of the women, and I’m sure they too danced in a line all their lives. A young woman in the crowd beside me, very attractive with strong, classically Greek features, offers to help me with my work: I tell her am fine, but she guesses I’d like a video or a photo of me sketching the scene, and she solemnly takes one using my phone. All with almost no English. So helpful.

We leave, reluctantly. Through the crowd I catch glimpses of my students, all drawing and painting the dancers. It’s too soon to leave. On the way back to the minibus I notice many people carrying small boxes of something. I ask the taxi driver what it is, but I don’t know why I bother because I have no idea what he says. It turns out to be a speciality sweet made at this time of year. I scurry back up the hill to the town to buy some, and find a lady at a stall with what looks like one of those enormous paella pans. There’s a dark reddish-brown sweet jelly-like substance in it, from which she cuts great chunks and parcels it up in cardboard boxes. It comes home to Galway with me, but I still have no idea at all what it is, or what it’s made of. It’s ok, but not so nice that you eat lots and feel ill. I look it up online and am none the wiser: but the Pelion region is like that. Undiscovered, by instagrammers, youtubers, bloggers.

Back at the hotel, the sun is shining through the clouds onto the sea off the coast of Lafkos. I try to capture it. Marcel strolls by and asks casually why I have not included the pool of gold on the water’s surface. I explain that it’s beyond my ability to depict that, but he insists I try. I do…and fail.

Saturday 26th April

There’s a weekly market in Argalasti, not too far from Lagou Raxi and Lafkos. I explain to the students that their task will be to capture the market sellers in their accordion sketchbooks.

Theme

There are some tricks to drawing people in public for example in a busy market: make Frankensketches (use different bits of other people to complete your figure) and to be a Sherlock Holmes (determining whether a person is likely to stay still for a while on the basis of how much wine or coffee they have left). I tell the students to try to listen out for snatches of conversation that they can add, too. We agree that we really don’t want to be clocked sketching people right in their faces, but I explain that most people are in a bubble of their own, and won’t notice.

I start drawing, and I am immediately “made”. The smiling young man I’m drawing comes over to me and asks if I will show it to hin when I am done. I tell him I will. I do, and he is so pleased and touched that he starts to heap lovely things into a bag: honey, tapenade, olives, and hands it to me. “For your talent,” he says, with a huge, white-toothed smile.

I have drawn his neighbour, a fat man in a pink t-shirt, and I go to show him too. Another stall-holder has asked me twice if i will draw him, but I don’t want to, because he doesn’t have the look I am after. He is kind of hippie-ish, he’s young-ish and doesn’t look Greek, and he has waist-length dreadlocks and one of those cotton woven tops with a hood. German, perhaps, but then again he could be anything, really. I have so far fended him off.

The fat man overhears me telling the hippie guy “later, maybe” and looks at the sketch I have made of him. “You start from the beautiful people and then the rest,” he growls throatily, and laughs a husky laugh. “You can tell him that,” I say.

I snap the very cool priest walking along, and I sketch from it later, but I also get a “live” sketch of him, making the other stall-holders laugh. “Probably telling them the confessions of the parishioners,” says Marcel. I don’t know – do Greek Orthodox go in for hearing confession?

A few young guys are gathered around a fishmonger van. They throw a couple of sardines to a tortoiseshell cat, who digs in hungrily, then picks up the fish and runs off.

I fill the last gap with a few coffee-drinkers at a café in the village.

I draw a few snatches of conversation.

That afternoon, lunch in a local taverna has been arranged for us all. It will be in Fabio’s, a seafood restaurant in the neighbouring village of Milina, a fishing village right on the edge of the water. Sue and her manager Leonidas have arranged for us to be served 11 dishes per four people…there’s octopus, grilled squid, chanterelle mushrooms, mussels in saffron and dill rice, roasted peppers, grilled prawns, tarama, red mullet, anchovies, potato salad and Greek salad and copious amounts of wine. The red snapper look so pretty but after so much delicious food (and some red snapper) neither Marcel nor I can manage anything else. Rather than see it binned, I wrap two fish carefully in a napkin, to take home to my hotel fridge for another day.

Sunday 27th April

It’s raining heavily this morning, and in April that means it’s very cold. We’re not inclined to get wet walking somewhere to sketch, so we stay in the hotel. (Next year I will arrange to have the taxis take us to a local church or two to sketch if it’s raining.) Some of the students nip out to pick some of the beautiful wild flowers that are growing everywhere, and we bring them back to draw them.

Theme

I demonstrate two ways to sketch flowers. The first, on the right, is to draw them carefully in pen and then paint them. The second is to use a brush only, from start to finish, adding a second layer for detail when the first is dry. I use a gorgeous brush I have recently been given by a Chinese brush company called Fuumuui. The set I have been using contains three travel brushes made of squirrel hair, in sizes 12, 8 and 4. They have great points and great spring, but time will tell whether they are durable. You can use the code ROISIN20 from their website for 20% off what are already extremely well-priced brushes – and vouched for by me! I don’t know what I get out of that – it hasn’t been made clear – but I really should ask. Either way, you’ll like them, and they won’t break the bank.

I am very anxious about the afternoon. If it’s still raining, i will be stuck with nowhere to go. The hotel management doesn’t want us in the lobby because we take over the place, but after I have a chat with the owner she agrees it will be fine in future. After all, we’ll be stuck if the sun chooses to stay away. Luckily, to my huge relief, the sun comes out after lunch and we sketch locally, heading down the little twisting path that leads from the hotel to the village. It’s a bit windy after all that rain, and while some of the students park their stool and sketch the rooftops and the gardens, a few, including me, turn the corner and find a sheltered spot out of the wind.

Theme

I do a demo on perspective, and you can see the result in the sketch of the building above, the one on the right with grass at the bottom. I am not big on following the rules of perspective – maybe I should be! – preferring to measure everything by eye like a jigsaw. It usually works and it’s much less tedious than using angles and vanishing points and so on. But the students aren’t really paying much attention, as they are enjoying the chat. I nip up and down along the path to offer guidance where I can. After a while, a few of them decide the warm afternoon sun has made them thirsty. Off they wander into the village square to buy some wine, and reappear a few minutes later with two bottles of wine – one rosé, one white – and some glasses! The very lovely waiter who served Marcel and me on Thursday evening has told the ladies that they can borrow the glasses on condition that they return them the next day. The women promise to do so, and say they’ll also have dinner while they’re at it…

We drink to each other’s health, there on the path in the dell of wildflowers and a little stream. we are friends, and it is bliss.

Monday 28th April

We are off to a beach this morning, one whose name I can’t remember. I do know there is a Byzantine ruin opposite it. Greece is full of ruins, so it’s no surprise that the original mosaic in front of it is unprotected, surrounded by grass encroaching onto it and is being nonchalantly walked upon by passers-by. I ask Sue how old the ruins are. “They date to about the year 400,” she says. Crikey! The wind this morning is shocking and the sea is in a wild, churned up rage. “Now you know exactly what Connemara looks like,” I tell the students. Everyone does their level best to sketch in the furious gale, and i am amazed when I see the work – it’s really great. There isn’t really a theme in this stop, because the wind has defeated me. But I tell my students that it’s pretty realistic as a sketcher to wind up somewhere where it’s not quite as wonderful as we’ve expected, but to be stoical and just continue making art. I am not sorry when it’s time to leave the locality.

Before we leave, I take the opportunity to demonstrate how to make a smooth blue sky, though. The wind blows the paint everywhere so it’s not quite perfect, but they get the idea. You put clear water on your sky area – not too much, not too little – and you make a decent puddle of blue wash, then put it onto the page in horizontal strokes with the biggest (and preferably natural fibre) brush you have. Then you don’t touch it until it’s bone dry.

In the afternoon we stay a little more locally, in Milina, where we sketch boats and their reflections…

…followed by a demo of a cup of coffee because not only is it something my students will probably get the opportunity to do a lot, it’s also a great opportunity to practice and observe values in action.

Later that evening we all head out to the taverna in Lafkos – it’s the hotel chef’s evening off – and have a delicious meal. i sketch the wine and the spirits, and throw another priest into the corner for good measure. He, like the small drinks on the right of the page, is done from a photo, but I have relaxed my insistence on sketching only from life and have decreed this week a drawing-from-photos week too. It’s fun! I have decided to permit this on my courses in future.

After our wonderful night in Lafkos Square we wind and weave our way home along the funny little path, by the light of the moon.

Tuesday 29th April

The last day of sketching, and it’s time to finish off all our sketches to be ready for the exhibition that will take place later in the afternoon on the terrace of the hotel. I do one more demo of flowers, brush-only again, and sneak in a sketch (from a photo) of Foxy, the adorable little dog who has latched onto our party of sketchers all week. If she had needed rescuing I would very gladly have stepped in, but she lives a perfect life in the care of a very groovy and animal-loving German couple who live just beside Lagou Raxi.

Everyone has filled at least one accordion sketchbook, and they look wonderful stood on their sides, lining the length of ten tables, the breathtaking sea view just beyond. Many of the students have never worked in watercolour before, or have never shared their work publicly, so it’s a proud moment for us all. The work the students have produced during the week is truly beautiful. Imagine 13 or so A5 accordion sketchbooks, filled on both sides, full of colour and life, telling the tale of Lafkos and the South Pelion. It is a very special occasion.

Wednesday 30th April

Marcel and i have a day off. Sue suggests we take a drive up to the east coast, where the movie Mama Mia was shot, in a little village called Damachouri. The views from the road is showstopping, but as you can probably guess that usually means hairpin bends and dizzying heights, of which neither am I a fan. At one point I am distraced and take Marcel down the wrong road (I am on navigation) and suddenly there’s no road. Just a gravel strip with bits falling away down the cliff, far more steep than any car can manage. But men are weird when it comes to driving and they don’t get scared of things that scare me: I want to get out (and do what?) but Marcel does a calm U-turn, at which I nearly die of fright. A large bird of prey flies into view and settles on a telegraph pole JUST above our heads, and it is clear to me that it is waiting for the inevitable snack coming its way. Actually, feast – both of us have overindulged somewhat this week.

At the restaurant in Damachouri, we eat delicious sinagrida. I decide to keep the fish head as I did with the one from Fabio’s, and while Marcel just nods non-commitally in the end I decide that i will sketch it there and then instead.

The sea beside our table is just glorious, and I am happy to get it into my sketch.

Back at the hotel, I have promised Sue that I will sketch a Greek salad for an art exhibition she’s taking part in. Something to do with children and understanding the origin of their local cuisine, so while I at first want to be paid for the little painting, I relent and ask for the Greek salad in question as payment. I am pretty sure that is the worst and also best payment I have ever had for a painting, because eating the salad the next day in the airport Burger King is just lovely, and so much the better for having been minutely observed by me during the sketch.

(Sue: “The Greek salad was invented at the start of mass tourism, in the sixties. Something nutritious, delicious and cheap was required to feed all the tourists.”)

Sue treats Marcel and me to dinner in our favourite taverna in Lafkos Square, along with another tutor who teaches at Lagou Raxi, and her husband. It’s a great evening of relaxed camaraderie, after my intense week of teaching.

Thursday 1st May

Our flight back to Ireland is at half three in the afternoon. I am paranoid about possible breakdowns and so on, so we leave far too early. We’re back in Kamena Vourla by half past seven, and there’s no one awake but us, and one little roadside café with a lovely terrace on the sand. Marcel and I have a coffee – we’ve already been on the road for two and a half hours – and we meet another super-friendly animal, the black and white cat you see below. I quickly sketch the yellow chairs and the lapping water, and the distant hills of the Pelion peninsula.

The previous morning I retrieved the fish from my hotel fridge and sketch those little red snapper…after which they are given to Sue’s ancient cat. He’s 21 and still able to enjoy a fish. He’s the beige guy in the middle.

Here’s a map, and an icon, from the church at the windy beach. He is called St Paisios. Now I have been writing for ages and you have been reading for ages, so I will leave it at that. If you would like a different angle on my trip, and a few video clips, check out my YouTube on the week: https://youtu.be/KI3oUlmzRiY

Come and join in the fun next year! Same time, same place. See you then! Yiamas!