Travelling Hopefully
This picture was just done for fun one summer’s evening on the roof of our home in Orvieto. I had met the two friends just that morning. German students from Weimar, they were travelling round Italy on a camping holiday. Lyz and Julie stepped out of their old 90s car and into my gallery, youthful, travelling hopefully, wise but not worldly. I showed them an Alma Tadema sketch in oils, Exhausted Maenads after the Dance and we used that as our inspiration. It is a song of summer, a good to be alive sort of picture.
The two travellers reminded me of when I first started my travels, exploring Europe in the early seventies. My best pal and I set out on summer vacations in battered old cars from the 50s: a Riley, a Morris, a Wolseley, long defunct British marques – my present Land Rover is old and battered, so not much has changed there! We never travelled without a complete tool kit and breakdowns were frequent. I was just 18 when I set out on my first journey round the Balkans, an adult but with only childhood memories, almost entirely ignorant of the world.
Exhausted Maenides After the Dance – Sir Lawrence Alma Tadema, 1874
In middle age things tend toward the familiar, we collect possessions, we have tried and tested friends, we become creatures of habit, cultivate a career, raise a family and perhaps loose that wide-eyed sense of excitement; in fact, if anything at all is unexpected it is rarely pleasant. Thankfully my life in my fifties is still full of exhilaration, my career is a constant journey into the unknown, travelling hopefully unconcerned if I arrive or not, and though we all hit the buffers eventually I intend to do it at while still underway!
One day as I was working on this picture my doctor passed by the gallery, looked around, peered over my shoulder, and said, ” Signor Nicholas………….(sigh)………….. you can die happy”. If it were not for the fact that he was my doctor……
