Tour de France 2026 – Part 2

This is Part 2 of my Tour de France this July. There’ll be a Part 3 too after I leave Toulouse and head to Pau in the foothills of the Pyrenees.

Tuesday 14th July

Our Moroccan taxi driver drops us off at the Hotel d’Assezat, a very grand building in the heart of Toulouse, that has been turned into an art gallery. You enter through an arch and inside is a courtyard surrounded by walls of windows, pillars and arches. Everything is ornate, pink and white brick. The house was built on the proceeds of a merchant who commercialised a blue dye, that the French call pastel and we call woad.

The usual over-the-top French security men are doing their thing at the entrance to the foyer. You’re not supposed to bring any art materials inside, so when my SketchPocket drops open in front of the older man on the desk I expect it to be put in his little stash of bags to be collected on the way out. He sees the paints, water brush, fude pens all lined up for action, and gives me a quizzical look.

“Believe me,” I say, “the LAST thing I want to do today is paint.”

He’s a good man and he sees truth behind my eyes, and he waves me through.

The exhibition is intriguing. Very unpopular opinion: Sorolla is a little hit-and-miss from a draughting point of view at times (aren’t we all?). In the end I conclude he just didn’t put shapes at the top of his priorities in his aim to capture the light accurately. Everyone goes on about his depiction of light, with good reason. It’s very inspiring, and in a way his occasional lack of draughting mastery makes his use of light even more impressive. The collection makes me long to live in a hot country, one set in the nineteenth century with no plastic anywhere, even though it’s taken the 21st century and a whole lot of plastic to see me standing there looking at these paintings.

I become separated from my friend at the end an I have to pass the security detail to look for her in the courtyard. That means I have to go through the line again to get back in. Although I have clearly just been through with my bag, the new security guy on the desk is in the mood to be a jobsworth and he confiscates my sketching bag (there are ten minutes to go before closing time, what on earth was I going to paint?). So when I meet up with my friend and we leave a few minutes later I make a point of reaching into the brown paper bag to retrieve my SketchPocket without the necessary by-your-leave of the guard. He is apoplectic that his system has been violated but he is not the boss of me and I prance away gleefully.

Wednesday 15th July

The faculty meets in the morning for a pow-wow and bonding session. We are handed bits of paper with questions on them. What have I learned through teaching? I decide to be honest: I have learned that other people have needs, other people are vulnerable – in short, other people exist. This sounds trite but artists are notoriously self-centred, and teaching forces you to think of others. It’s a good session, and I meet one of the people who was incredibly supportive back in the day, when I was nobody. We are doing musical chairs to meet as many of the team as possible, and I find myself beside him eventually. I tell him what he did for me all those years ago.

I tell him how on my birthday back in, I don’t know, maybe 13 years ago, I had ‘flu but didn’t know it yet, and was taken by my husband to look at a patch of sea where he was thinking of starting an oyster farm. I tell him how on that birthday morning the biting Atlantic wind in early February was more than I could bear and that when my husband tried to take me for coffee and cake, nowhere was right (I was brewing a temperature)… too busy, too smelly, too hot, too noisy, and how I found a nook in the wall of a bank and leaned into it, and started to cry. When we got home I had no appetite (‘flu) and my husband was angry that I didn’t want the meal he had planned. I sat miserably in an armchair and opened my phone to a wonderfully supportive birthday message from this man, telling me how great an artist I was and never to stop believing in myself. I cried even more and spent a few days in bed with proper ‘flu but I never forgot how he turned my terrible birthday around. My colleague seems touched, and in the coming days I see what a good soul he is. It is one of the highlights of my week in Toulouse.

The faculty is taken for a tour of the city. Yes, it’s a billion degrees, but I have my trick with the wet-scarf-draped-on-hat and I am fine. Afterwards we are taken for lunch in a beautiful restaurant called Le Bibent, which is apparently iconic.

“It’s like dining in Versailles,” says one of my colleagues as we traipse in. The entire restaurant has been booked for our faculty, maybe ninety or a hundred of us.

Later, I think about what we were served. I think about how I fancy myself as a cook: how I am really careful to honour ingredients and make sure everything is prepared to it best. And more often than not what you can do at home is much better than what you get when you dine out. But this meal has me a little confused: it is beyond anything I I have experienced. Cuisine as fine art, humbly and simply presented but sublime in taste. A small example: when I sip the wine I am stopped in my tracks. I am, quite simply, unprepared for this. If I tell you what we were served for lunch, you will wonder what was so great about it, but I will tell you that we had cold mint and pea soup followed by chicken and mashed potatoes and meringue with mango for dessert. Doesn’t seem very fancy, does it? But it’s all I can do. I could add that everyone at my table was virtually swooning, and perhaps that will convince you…

The opening ceremony takes place on Wednesday evening. I can’t concentrate on what’s being said. I am feeling lonely again. Why can’t I just cop myself on?

Thursday 16th July

At last the Symposium proper starts. I meet my first sketchers in Marché Victor Hugo and I am ON. This is my happy place: sharing my cool tricks with my students (or as one very gracious longtime student says to me, “your carefully-thought-out techniques and solutions to sketching challenges”). I send them to find and sketch ingredients for famous Toulouse dishes. Cassoulet, poulet à la something, alicuit…none of which I sample while I am there as my mentals have let me down and I can’t face dining alone.

The students can only use the five colours of burnt sienna, nickel azo yellow, magenta, phthalo green and ultramarine. I do likewise…

…and as always, I am delighted by my lovely students and their enthusiasm. Naturally! We are in a traditional French indoor market surrounded by the best food in the world, sold by the jolliest of merchants.

I draw poultry at a couple of stalls. I do not care for the way the chicken’s heads are threaded through their bodies. The grotesque positioning of the heads reminds me of an unforgettably horrific scene at the end of the movie about Idi Amin, the name of which escapes me, which is just as well as I don’t want to make it easy for you to look it up. I don’t know why I still draw them like that. “They’re dead,” says someone, “they don’t know.” But it makes me consider going vegan, as French markets often do.

I overhear a British voice. A man says to his friend, “Let’s see, you eat chicken, you eat fish…” and I think how vast the chasm is between the French and the English when it comes to food.

I stand and paint at the fish stall which is exhilarating but which is frustrating through being continually blocked by shoppers. But that is what I, and the students, have signed up for.

Some of my students mini-mutiny and use extra colours, so I resolve to be much stricter the following day with the next group.

In the afternoon, it’s time for my demo. Mine, apparently, is about sketching people quickly: one of my students reminds me of my theme, which is great because one forgets what one has submitted, ten months previously. I meet my wonderful assistant and while it takes a few minutes, it soon becomes clear to us that we might as well be sisters from another mister. Fancy that! You never know where or when the lightning bolt of friendship will strike. She is a talented artist and writer from Barcelona who also loves comics, and we share a sense of humour, so it was clearly a match made by the gods. She guides us to the spot where my demo is to take place and I draw the men lounging around a small square: where would demo-doers be with men lounging around squares? Without subjects, that’s where!

Friday 17th July

Another gorgeous group of sketchers who enter enthusiastically into the spirit of sketching standing up in the market. I bloody love teaching and I flipping love students.

I see a beautiful woman selling wine. She has smooth olive skin and glossy hair swept back into a chignon. She wears a beautiful striped blouse with little pleats at the neck and puffy sleeves, with an adorable bow at the nape of the neck. I sketch her.

I see young bucks selling charcuterie, who have loads of bouncy black hair and snappy little moustaches. I draw them.

I see a charcuterie seller whose days of thick hair are in the rear view mirror. But he seems serious about his work. He slices meat and wraps parcels in turn. I try to catch him a bit more each time he turns. I think I am in the charcuterie aisle.

My assistant, Isabelle, poses for me. I show my students how one can make a lovely outline with a waterbrush and very dilute paint, and add ink on top using gestural strokes. I catch a young fishmonger on his smoke break and he makes a great subject.

I start a sketch of a beautiful lady cheesemonger. A cheesemongress. I buy goat’s cheese from her, a baguette from another stall and a lovely-looking tomato from an Arab greengrocer at a vegetable stall just outside the entrance, which I try to draw, and which disappears the second I start sketching. The ensemble makes a very nice lunch, but I am left with a few ugly ink lines where I started the vegetable stall.

After lunch I take part in the workshop of the man who was so nice to me when I was just a crazily ambitious woman living in the wild west of Ireland, rapidly losing hope. Of course I did – he is an absolute genius and a great man. The instructors get to take part in the workshop of a colleague. I sit across from one of the students who was in my workshop that morning, and two other men. They’re a lovely trio and we spend the really peaceful afternoon trying to use the unfamiliar tools we’ve been given for the workshop.

I like some of my drawings and hate others.

The workshop comes to an end and we head down to the Garonne for an evening’s entertainment. I am happy because I am in great company and am loving the people I have met. If you read my Part 1 you’ll be aware that my first visit to the Garonne ended in the blackest of moods. Second time lucky, maybe? We get there and the vibe is super. Friends and sketchers everywhere. Colleagues I haven’t seen for ages. I sit at a table and settle down for a great evening as the sun starts to set, and everything is pink and orange…

…and I draw a man sitting opposite our table…

…and I look at my phone and there’s a missed call, and texts from my daughter. She is gravely ill in hospital and needs her mum.

I make my excuses and leave. All I want to do is talk to her. Soon I am back in my hotel room, drenched in sweat but THERE and able to talk to her properly.

Saturday 18th July

Last workshop of the Symposium. I draw the man who props up the bar all morning long…

…and an adorable little girl who has been plonked onto the bar counter by her parents while they have a glass of wine. She reads her book quietly and very sweetly.

It’s HOT in the streets and it’s coming to the end of my last workshop, and to lunchtime. I think my nerves are at me again. I am on the steps leading up to the market, and 16 students are gathered around for the final throwdown of sketches. There are a few tables on the terrace outside the entrance to the market, and at one of then stand a few young-ish men, making an exuberant racket. A fishmonger emerges from the market carrying a plastic crate. He says something to me, and maybe I’m too ready for a row, or maybe my French is less amazing than I like to think, but I misunderstand.

What I (incorrectly) hear:

“You’re making too much noise.”

I am immediately defensive. “But those guys are making more noise than us.”

The fishmonger tries again, and says anyway, he was just saying he’s sorry that he’s going to make a loud noise. He upends the plastic crate and starts to spill ice into the skip. There’s a lot of ice and it is like thunder as it enters the bin. Once again I am mortified to have leaped to counter-attack because my default position is defensive, and my French is far from perfect.

In the afternoon we offer some of the participants a thing the organisers call The Big Crit. It’s where people who have bought all four workshops can come in and get feedback from the various instructors. I hated it last year because no one came to me but what did I expect – I had made sure to sit far from everyone. I have done the same thing this time but luckily some brave souls come to me.

And I even do a fluke-ily great sketch for one of the participants –

But I am getting tired now, so i will just tell you that the closing ceremony was great, and the two people who bought my donated paintings were over the moon: richly deserved, as both were volunteers at the Symposium, there on their own dime and their own time. I was ecstatic too because I got my sketching hero’s sketch, which is now at the framer’s.

A couple of the other instructors said they weren’t crazy about the low prices our pieces were sold for, but my view is that people could access work who might not be able to buy at market value – as did I.

The new friends I made during the Symposium are really special people whom I am privileged to know. Toulouse 2026 didn’t start out well for me and was emotional for various reasons (why am I always away when my loved ones back home are not well?) but I am very grateful for these new beautiful people in my life, and I loved the vibe in Toulouse.

And I won’t be going to next year’s USk Symposium in Toronto from 4th to 7th August 2027, because I will be teaching in France until 31st July and in the USA from 23rd August, so it’s too much back-and-forth.

If you would like to hear about the last stage of my Tour de France 2026, tune into Part 3 soon.

Oh by the way – good news, maybe – from 1st September I will be offering membership of my Sketch Club for just €12.50 per month. For that you will get one live (and recorded) class per month, first access to my workshops and courses, membership of our private Facebook group where you can share your work and get feedback from me and an online social chat with friends!