Travelogue: The Perfect Set Up- Crete, Santorini and Croatia

It was a looooong trip.

All in all, we traveled on nine airplanes, two rental cars, and a boat. It was just shy of a month.

In case you can’t see it, this little fold out feature reads: Athens-Crete-Santorini-Plitvice-Zadar-Split-Milna-Hvar-Vis-Mljet-Korcula-Dubrovnik-Athens-Home

Seeing that this is an artist blog, I will stay on the topic of art and art-making. But, I do have a photo-album of the trip on my personal facebook page HERE.

What's On Your Bucket List?

While I loved the whole trip, seeing Santorini and the ancient frescoes of Akrotiri have been on my bucket list! Those of you who have followed me for a while know that many pieces in my Archeology Art series are based on these same frescoes. Seeing them in person was truly a thrill!

If you would like to read more about the frescoes of ancient Thera, read my blog entries The Saffron Gatherers: Delight Amid the Ruins and The Adorant- Large and Small.

Art-Making While Traveling

Most artists I know (at least, most female artists I know,) lay a little guilt trip on themselves. They plan to travel and they pack some art supplies, telling themselves they are going to make art and have a deeply creative, spiritual travel experience. Then they don't do it, or do it only once, and they beat themselves up for not being a "real artist."

This was me.

I even wrote a blog entry about it a few years ago entitled My Vacation From the "Shoulds".

2024 sketch

Part of the problem was the way I have labeled myself. I had always thought of myself as an "observational painter." I don't know why I thought of myself this way, but I did. So, when I went on a trip I would haul out my little watercolors or whatever and try to paint what I saw. But it always seemed like work to me, and it was a bit draining. Not exactly inspiring.

But I don't do that anymore. I no longer put myself in a box.

I accepted that I really don't want to paint my surroundings at all.

Last winter I went to Mexico, and created my own sketchbook to bring with me. (You can read and see pictures HERE.)With newfound freedom I doodled and sketched and collaged and scribbled notes.

What is ironic and revealing is that I ended up making art about my surroundings quite a lot, only instead of being straight representation, it was about what I experienced, what I saw, and how I thought and felt about it. So much more than just a picture.

The Perfect Set Up

Another barrier to art-making while traveling is finding your perfect little set-up.

This looooong trip wasn't a relaxing stay in a Mexican resort. I couldn't just hunker down with a bunch of stuff, spread out and go for it. I had to travel light, compact, and be able to pull my art stuff out of my suitcase and put it away again easily.

First, I had to make the perfect sketchbook.

In this blog entry "Cool Little Travel Sketchbook" you can see what I made before I left. It is about 6x8", and I used hinged keyrings for a binding so I could lay it flat. I could also add or switch around pages as I went.

Then, I had to make my art supply set up.

The black container is a semi-rigid zippered box that used to contain attachments to a now-defunct chirogun. In it I had three small ziploc bags with:

watercolor pencils and a waterbrush
various pens and pencils
two large acrylic markers and the all important glue stick!

Also included was a snap-off exacto blade, a small smoothing tool, and a pencil sharpener.

I also had two larger ziplocs; one was for an 8" gridded ruler and my collected ephemera, the other held the sketchbook.
(The only thing I forgot was a hole-punch!)

As I went along, I gathered tickets, maps, brochures, etc. About every three days I would take a break, pull out my stuff and immerse myself. I was interested in keeping a general chronology, and found I was about 3-5 days behind in any one location. So, for instance, I would work with what I had collected in Zadar three days later in Split. I even worked for several hours during our home-bound layover at Heathrow airport.

The result is a combination of collage, doodling, drawing, and journaling.

When I got home, I worked on the last few pages. Then I created the frontispiece and put fabric on the covers.

To be frank, I am not quite sure what to do with this.

It was created under limiting circumstances, and so when I look at it, I see many pages that could be improved. And yet if I go back into it and improve it, it is no longer an artifact of my trip.

So, I suppose I must allow it to be as it is, and present it to the world in its imperfect perfection.

Below are a few images of some of the more interesting pages. Below that, you can see a video of me paging through the book and unfolding a few pop outs as well.