The 7th Swiss Urban Sketching Symposium, Geneva: Part Three

PLEASE NOTE: Due to a cancellation, one place has just become available in my French Pyrenees week-long course, 18th-25th October this year: https://atelier.clos-mirabel.com/painting-holidays/vignettes-of-the-pyrenees-a-sketchbook-masterclass-in-ink-and-watercolour-with-roisin-cure If you’re free and can get a flight, have a look at the schedule for the week. Just the thing before the long winter sets in.

But back to last week in Geneva: a few little bits to wrap up my three-part blog!

Sunday 7th September

After a hideously late night during which my friends stayed up into the small hours to play a drawing game, I do not feel the best this morning. I will never understand where the Spanish get their energy. Yes, I am a morning person, but it can’t all be explained like that, because many Spanish people start their working day much earlier than me (I’ve heard 7.00am isn’t uncommon) and taking a siesta isn’t really a thing in most parts now. So how do they do it? Are they just higher life forms than us early birds? Then again, there were other nationalities present at the drawing game, full of beans until 2.00am: French, British and an American, so I suspect it might just be me. The drawing game involves making ten-second portraits of the person sitting opposite you, very badly, then changing to the next person along and adding to the just-started portrait your neighbour has made, and so on.

I pack up and clear out of my hotel room, and head out for a last sketch. I want to capture the Jet d’Eau for my students, to demonstrate that even a tiny sketchbook can contain something of a giant scale. After one false start which is so horrible it will only ever be seen by the loyal eyes of my Sketch Club, I cross the bridge over the crystal clear, turquoise water of the lake to a tiny promontory where I see a statue of Rousseau in the shade of the trees. Just what I need! It’s a hot day and I was terribly uncomfortable sketching the first, failed attempt at the fountain.

This time it goes better. I finish up and head back over the bridge to Quai des Bergues, where I will go full tourist with the hour I have left and take a little train around the Old Town. As I cross the bridge, I reflect on the nature life that’s much in abundance on the lake. I am glad I did. Geese, swans, ducks of all sorts and seabirds (no idea why the latter are there) make Lake Geneva their home. In the vast open space above the lake, oblivious to the traffic noise and cacophony of the city, a seagull and a rook are engaged in mortal combat, swooping and diving like planes locked in a Second World War dogfight. The rook is seen off – possibly – but it strikes me how animals just get on with their fight for survival regardless of the setting.

Soon I am in the airport. i am such a heavy phone user that my battery is always low if I’m on an evening flight, and I never remember to bring a power bank, or have my charging cable to hand. So I pass the time by sketching my fellow passengers…

…and at the departure gate for my Aer Lingus flight a woman beside me comments on what I’m drawing. I tell her all about urban sketching and how it’s a great way to pass the time, especially when your flight has been delayed (ours is now an hour late). She tells me she’s the new chair of the International Women’s something – I can’t remember what – and that they are always looking for speakers. I tell her she doesn’t have to ask twice, we exchange contacts and board the plane.

Settled into my seat I learn that the plane won’t be taking off any time soon. It has been late arriving from Zurich – why, we’re not told, and must make do with that – and I figure if I draw what I see out the window, Murphy’s Law says that it will take off before I am finished. Sadly it doesn’t. However, it does give me the chance to draw on top of a failed sketch from a few nights earlier, on the Quai des Something in the dark, eating fondue with my lovely colleagues, so now I have that scribbled-upon memory and a souvenir of Geneva airport terminal, all on the one unattractive page. Hurray! (You can just about make out the white-gel-penned-over silhouette of my very beautiful colleague from France, Marielle Durand.)

To make matters worse, Aer Lingus don’t have any food for us on board. This time the excuse is that the plane has been going since 8.30am. Surely that was scheduled? They weren’t taken by surprise? I don’t claim to know much about traffic control (although I have seen Pushing Tin), but I can’t picture a scenario where someone shouts out “anyone still got an empty plane to go to Dublin? Aer Lingus? Great! We’ll stick you on Runway Seven!” and the airplane kitchen is now empty, caught as it were on the hop. So all I can have is a packet of Tayto crisps and a bottle of wine. I cannot lie, they go down a TREAT. I draw the wine bottle twice to get the cute drawing in on the label in, and now I have something to sit opposite my fast sketch of Ramón, the very wonderful amante of my colleague Maru Godas.

At last I am back at Dublin Airport. There is a near-scrum at the Citylink bus stop, as everyone has now missed their bus due to the two-hour-plus delay. The unticketed are crowding around the Indian driver, in whose gift it is to allocate unfilled seats. I have been forced to put a very assertive French woman in her place: she’s insisting it’s not her fault that she missed her bus, as her plane has been delayed. She is demanding to be let on the bus, and is right up in the driver’s face so much that I tell her that everyone’s there because their plane was delayed, but he’s well up to the challenge and tells her it’s not his fault either that her plane was delayed. It’s now nearly half past nine for a six-forty-five scheduled bus, it’s dark and windy at the bus stop, but we all get a place. Then there is an alarm in the bus that cannot be overridden (something to do with tyre pressure), and it beeps shrilly every ten seconds for the next three hours.

So there you have it – the life of a jet-setting international sketcher! Goodness, there really is no pleasing some people!

See you next time…

…or next week? Still a couple of places in my Dunmore East course this coming weekend, 19th-21st September!