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I have been painting and drawing Spain more and more over the last fifteen years. As I travelled and worked the ambition to make the most Spanish of all journeys grew ever stronger until, in the Autumn of 1999, I finally set out.
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I have been painting and drawing Spain more and more over the last fifteen years. As I travelled and worked the ambition to make the most Spanish of all journeys grew ever stronger until, in the Autumn of 1999, I finally set out.
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Images
of the Camino de Santiago
Like
every other pilgrim on foot, I carried everything I needed in my rucksack
and stayed in the simple refuges that lie along the way – monasteries,
parish rooms, deserted old farms, disused schools, the basement of a
town hall, a barn. During the six weeks I spent walking I filled four
books with sketches; I did not take a camera. These studies are the
basis for the works on show at Upfront. There are eighty works; drawings
and paintings in a variety of media, a few prints and some 'live' pages
from the sketchbooks. 
They
cover the whole journey in sequence; from St. Jean Pied-de-Port in France
through the Pyrenees to Roncesvalles, across Navarre, between the vineyards
of the Rioja and over the seemingly endless meseta of Old Castile; across
the plains, hills and valleys of León, over the Cantabrian mountains
and down into the green woods and fields of Galicia. In the photograph,
(courtesy of a fellow traveller), I am on the longest pilgrim bridge
in Spain, at Hospital de Orbigo in León.