Cortina
When Susan lived in Venice, she had an older Venetian lady friend called Nai who lived on Via Garibaldi. Nai also had a family holiday home in the Dolomites where she would stay every summer to avoid the heat and humidity of Venice. Susan had a long standing invitation to stay there. This was the year we finally accepted. Right up until the day we arrived, the Dolomites had not seen any sun throughout August and the temperatures were seasonally low. As soon as we showed up, the skies began to clear, a good omen for the week.
Every day we drove to various towns like Cortina, but would often stop and pull over for me to paint some outstanding view that was never going to fit onto the small pages of a leather bound sketchbook.
Tre Cime di Lavaredo
Despite the challenges of attempting to paint the vastness of the Dolomites on paper less than 6″ x 4″ I loved the experience of painting the awesome nature of the landscape before me. My sketchbook watercolour Tre Cime di Lavaredo, the Three Peaks of Lavaredo, was one of more than a dozen studies that captured these stunning mountains, often partly shrouded by clouds, and often lit by either the early morning light or the setting sun.
As I’m going through this particular sketchbook I’m feeling inspired to do some large watercolours from this trip that was twenty years ago!
Mont Blanc
Whilst walking around Tre Cime di Lavaredo you really do feel as though you are standing on top of the world. Susan had her own spiritual experience when we stood overlooking Marmalade, the highest mountain in the Dolomites.
“Your righteousness is like the highest mountains, your justice like the great deep; you, Lord, preserve both people and animals” Psalm 36:6
All of this was the perfect preparation for when we went to Chamonix in 2015 and I was able to make watercolour studies of Mont Blanc. This became “Mont Blanc and Manganese Blue” a painting that was selected for exhibition at the Royal Watercolour Society in 2016, ten years after our trip to the Dolomites.