About Place: A painting workshop on the Camino

Rebecca Crowell and I are staying in a gorgeous retreat centre on the Camino de Santiago called Flores del Camino. It's in the small stone village of Castrillo de los Polvazares with a population of 100. Voted one of the most beautiful villages in Spain, the streets are cobblestone and each of the unique earth-coloured stone houses is joined to the next in rows that wind through the town.

There are no yellow arrows or brass shells embedded in the village road marking the way of the Camino, as there are in larger cities. It basically consists of one-street and the Camino resumes at the edge of town. Paying attention to the moment doesn't stop though when you come into the village because walking the uneven cobblestone streets is an exercise in mindfulness itself!

The owners of this retreat centre, Bertrand Gamrowski and Basia Goodwin are committed to supporting pilgrims who are walking the Camino, offering them a place to stay as well as offering dinners (payment by donation) for those staying at the local albergue. Bertrand and Basia also offer workshops and lectures on various aspects of the Camino, the nearby petroglyphs and sacred geometry and will offer a couple of lectures to the students in our workshop to help us more deeply connect with place.

I am struck with the integrity of the pilgrims and the commitment of Basia and Bertrand. After walking the Camino, both felt called to Castrillo, leaving their jobs and their lives in London, England to move here. Now their two small children will grow up in this beautiful village, speaking Spanish and feeling comfortable with pilgrims coming and going through their home.

Way-marker for the Camino just outside of Castrillo de los Polvazares

As we learn more about the village, the Camino and this centre, Rebecca and I are rethinking our workshop. We're looking at a more spiritual focus, where we take the importance of the Camino into consideration. How can we not? It's the very essence of this retreat centre and of the little village.

Petroglyphs

To learn more about the area, we drove yesterday on a circular sightseeing route that Bertrand laid out for us. His tour took us to see petroglyphs and other beautiful sites. On our drive, Rebecca and I fell in love with the soft stones we found that we could grind up for pigments, and we collected local soil from this hillside below. We stopped to look for soft stones by a couple of rivers and when we spotted a patch of bright yellow soil on the roadside, we turned the car around to scoop some up! We mix the earth with a binder to make it into paint.

Red hillside

Smashing the soft sandstone. What fun!

Painting made with natural pigments

One focus of the Camino and of all pilgrimages is the connection between heaven and earth, between the spirit and the body. It seems right then that one aspect Rebecca and I will explore in our workshop is to have students create pigments from various local soils, symbolically connecting the spirit of the Camino with the physicality of the earth to better identify with place.

Meet the Owners of a Scottish Castle

Anne Tristine Nguyen, Ali Orr Ewing, their children, Ava, Atticus and their dog, Harriet Beecher Stowe. Dunskey Estate, Portpatrick, Scotland Anne Tristine Nguyen and her husband, Alistair Orr Ewing are the owners of Dunskey Estate near Portpatrick, Scotland where I will teach a painting workshop in September. Dunskey is a splendid Edwardian castle on 2000 acres of ocean-front land with miles of walking trails. As well as daily workshop sessions in the studio on the top floor of the castle, our small group of artists will enjoy breathtaking hikes, superb accommodation and fabulous meals. Not having met owners of a castle before, I asked Anne if I could interview her to hear a little of their background story and that of the castle. Can you tell me a little of your personal story and that of your husband, Alistair Orr Ewing? Anne emigrated to America when she was ten years old, but it was at an art gallery in Saigon, her birthplace, where she met Al

The Importance of Silence in Art

Gathering Light 60x60" Oil on canvas © 2014 Janice Mason Steeves Michael David Rosenberg, the musician known as Passenger, sings, "See all I need is a whisper in a world that only shouts." In the workshops I teach, I find that one of the most common problems with paintings is that they shout. Most have too much going on: too many small shapes, too much texture, extremes of colour, too many lines, too much, too much. One thing I say most often as I walk around the classroom working with students individually, is 'make bigger shapes'. But not only bigger shapes. Quiet shapes. Where can your eye go and rest in the painting? That isn't a consideration in much of contemporary painting or much of contemporary life. Ours is a noisy world both visually and auditorily. Ours is a world that shouts. People are afraid of silence. I wrote a blog post 3 years ago about planning a retreat in my own home, where I shut off the computer and the phon

Lessons that Stone Walls Teach

Dry stone wall in the Burren, Co. Clare, Ireland I've just returned from teaching a Workshop in Wild Places class in the Burren in County Clare, Ireland. Writing this post, I'm reminded of another post I wrote after visiting Inishmaan, the middle of the Aran Islands off the west coast of Ireland several years ago. Stone walls crisscrossed the island in tight webs like a fisherman's net. I wrote then that the web of stone walls made me think of the idea of putting limitations on our painting as a way of exploring more deeply and how walls give limits against the limitless. You can read that article here. As our group hiked in the Burren with our guide, Marie McGauran we learned that the walls are stronger because of the holes in them. The wind can pass through. The oldest stone walls, estimated to be 3500 years old are at Skara Brae, a Neolithic site in Orkney. Most walls were built in the 18th and 19th century, marking areas of private ownership and resulting in poverty

Janice Mason Steeves

Search This Blog