In tidying a corner of my studio in January, with the rain coming down and the sky almost incessantly grey, as it sometimes is in Cornish winter, I found a folder with a pastel sketch that delighted me and was something of an antidote to the weather outside.
It was of a tree in a sunlit yard between two levels in the small backstreets of Skopelos town. This was on the island of Skopelos which my wife and I visited in 2002. Then it was a quiet island in the Sporades group in the middle of the Aegean sea between Greece and Turkey.
Since then they have used the island as the backdrop for the hit film ‘Mama Mia’ and now it has famous world-wide significance as a popular site of pilgrimage for lovers of Mama Mia and ‘Abba’. It is no longer a quiet backwater in the blue Aegean Sea.
When we visited, many years before, it still represented an Arcadian vision of olive groves, spring flowers, hillsides with herbs we took back to cook with, and swimming in sparkling waters on a distant deserted beach at Glisteri.
The pastel was drawn in a corner of a street in Skopelos town, a few levels above a busy little waterfront with fishing boats selling their catches.
Over the last 22 years I meant at some time to pick it up and use it to make a painting, and people it with the slow, quiet bustle in the town.
So this is how I spent my January, under the lowering Cornish sky in the studio. The rain was hammering down but in my head I was back on Skopelos in late April, in its sunlit streets and before the first cut of hay in the meadows around and under the olive groves.
(Picture of the Skopelos canvas)
The canvas (20” X 30”) will be for sale in the Liskeard CRUK exhibition running from March 5th to March 10th in the Public Hall, Liskeard, 10am – 7pm, Tuesday evening preview and daily Weds – Sat, and to 1pm on the last day, Sunday. It’s a big exhibition with hundreds of wonderful paintings by local artists here in the East of Cornwall.