This is the main blog for the easelspace web sites, easelspace runs a free to join artist community web site and also the paid galleries www.easelfaces.com and www.travelscapers.com. easelspace is run by 2 artists Miki and Jean, along with Adrian and Lori who have a strong interest in web sites and web development.
Now you can interact with all your friends over high-quality video and audio on all pages, so give it a go!
Eventually I found the bag of my dreams!
When I go sketching outside -which is something I do very often-, I always take the minimum amount of stuff: a sketching book and a pen. But there is a problem: I like my big sketching book. Well, not that big, 40 x 40 cm, plus the spring along the top, but just big enough so as not to fit in any bag. Well, I bought one once in a German art shop, but it was all black, so serious. It makes me sad just to look at it, no way I can use it to go and sketch, where I do need to feel in a positive state of mind!
I couldn’t believe my eyes as I saw this one in a Cafe-Shop in Bubion, a little village from the Sierra Nevada some days ago. Not only does my sketch book fit in it exactly, but the bag is soooo cool, so artistic. More or less like in this painting I did of it. Lovely, crazy bag, isn’t it?
Well, I will use the occasion to introduce you to our new Easelspace gallery. In the last 3 weeks, I presented here
Travelscapers (landscapes from all around the word)
Easelfaces (portraits and figures from around the world)
Now we have just launched our
All sorts of still life from international painters will be presented here. if you want to join one of these galleries, we must charge 10 dollars the year for one (15 for 2, 20 for 3). We have a lot of costs and work with all these sites, hence the fees. But we are doing a great deal to gradually increase the value of and the visits to, these galleries, and aiming to be one day, as soon as possible, among the most visited online galleries for people searching for landscapes, portraits or still lifes.
But if you can’t afford the membership to our special galleries you can still join us at Easelspaces, the “mother” gallery. Mother is generous and doesn’t cost anything 
.
We are a nice community of international artists (amateurs, semi-professionals and professionals) gathered on that great site created by artists for artists, and offering many possibilities for presenting your art and developing a nice relationship with other artists from the world.
We left Turre in our Boomobile about 3 in the afternoon. As always, travel preparations were minimal: some stuff to paint, some stuff to eat, some stuff to wear, not forgetting some warm sweatshirts and wandering boots this time. Then out of the house, into the motorhome, and off we went. Our destination: the Sierra Nevada, Andalucia, Spain. Nowhere special in mind there really, I had just googled a little bit before we left and written down a list of mountain villages, some of them lying quite high, about 1400 metres. We would probably visit them if they happened to cross our road up there. This is the way we mostly travel: hardly planning, and led by fate.
But I had some very uncomfortable doubts: the weather was not good. We hadn’t seen any rain for months here in Turre, but suddenly, today, it was raining and the sky was black. Climbing Spanish mountain roads up to the Sierra Nevada in a big motorhome under torrential rain was not one of the most reassuring thoughts ..
Well, somewhere on the way the rain stopped, and as soon as we left the highway about 40 kilometres after Almeria the road started climbing and deviating seriously. I felt increasingly uncomfortable, so uncomfortable that thoughts of going back home crossed my mind at each curve and each new gradient. And although the rain had stopped, dark clouds were still hanging in the sky, the higher we drove, the darker they became. When we eventually reached El Parque Natural de La Sierra Nevada, it was about 7 PM, A spectacular landscape, no doubt, worth a life of paintings. But like always in these kind of places, no chance to park the motorhome safely. I find it always so frustrating to go through these dream landscapes, to start putting in my head lines and colours on an imaginary piece of paper and then not to be really able to start: it hurts deeply. The downside of travelling in a motorhome… the only one though!
In fact we wanted to stop now for the night, but we couldn’t find a place. We soon reached a little village called Berchulez. I wished we could have stayed there, it was lovely, and had loads of motifs for me to sketch. But there was just a big town fiesta going on and hundreds of cars and scooters and people and animals were trying to find some place in that tiny space and we almost got stuck in the middle of the village – Of course, to the big pleasure of the people there. No way then to look for place, we simply escaped, and again it hurt deeply in my artist’s soul that I couldn’t do even one sketch!
We decided to head towards Trevelez, one of the villages on the list. I must say that the road to it was one of the scariest I have ever been on. I suddenly understood what was meant with these road re-inforcement works announcements we had seen at the entrance of The Parque Natural: 600 000 Euro here, 700 000 Euro there, for sections of road not even 10 kilometres long. No wonder: everywhere, tons of rocks and stones were lying on the side of the road, well, on the road itself too, and some parts of the road were totally destroyed, sometimes half of it totally missing, or fallen away underneath, or above, and cracks and creases all along… incredibly scary, believe me! I guess this was the result of the abundant rains we had in Spain some months ago. I can’t even imagine what really happened there, how many accidents must have occurred on this road alone, how many deaths, and how many places must have been cut off from the rest of the world for how long! Really it must have been terrible. The whole scenery reminded me of the images of Haiti after the earthquake, on a smaller scale of course, but still apocalyptic somehow…
The situation was aggravated as the mist came up and only the first meters on the road in front of the motorhome seemed to exist… the rest had totally disappeared. Needless to say, I was scared to death and to tell the truth I wished we had gone back home as it first crossed my mind. But home was far now, and it was getting darker. To drive back on that hell of a road in the other direction, in fact on the very side of the road which had fallen away and was often bordered by some deep precipices, was simply unthinkable.
Anyway, we eventually arrived in Trevelez, proudly standing 1476 metres high.
“In Trevelez you will touch the sky”
is written at the entrance of the town, and indeed, the white buildings climb up the mountain, higher and higher, to finally disappear into the sky.. or into the mist, but what is the difference anyway!
Sorry, no sketch to show for this first day of the trip… let’s hope mañana will be more prolific!
Just a tiny little watercolour which I quickly did before dinner on that evening, an impression from memory of the town as we arrived
By Miki
With me being the Travelscapers travel guide, I think it is up to me to be brave and to start this blog which will take us all around the world, in words and paintings.
To start with, some words about the logistic of my painting trips: whenever it is possible, we travel with our motorhome, which we called “The Boomobile”. I always dreamt of travelling through the world in such a machine and to paint everything I see. Being masters in trying to realise our dreams, some years ago in 2007, we decided to buy one. The motorhome market here in Spain being empty, we bought it on the internet, from somebody in Brittany. We flew there, picked it up and brought it back to Spain. Needless to say, it was quite a risky thing, but we have been very lucky, the motorhome was -and still is- in a perfect state of health and the sellers were a wonderful couple. And since we have it, we travel around in it, park it wherever I see something to paint, and really: I cannot think of a better way for my travel sketching.
Now, and before we lift anchor to take another little trip soon, I want to tell you an anecdote from my last painting trip, at the beginning of June this year. We went to Agua Amarga, a tiny little village by the sea, in the provincia of Almeria (Andalusia, Spain) and located within the famous Natural Park of Cabo de gata-Nijar. To give you an idea how the village looks like , here is one of the sketches I did
One of these typical Spanish villages, where everybody seems to take it as easy as possible and delays everything until “manana”, under the motto: “What I can do today, I can do it tomorrow too…”
Now to the anecdote. As far as possible, we always park the Boomobile in a lovely place, this time it was directly by the sea, almost on the beach. When you live in such a house on wheels and with windows all around, you participate much more in the life around you and you can’t help observing and noticing what is going on “by the neighbours”. And sometimes you really witness mysterious things, like this time in Agua Amarga. As we arrived, there was a funny motorhome parked in the middle of the beach.For artistic reasons I changed the scenery a little, put the motorhome by the house… by the way, this is how I sketch, I often de-group and regroup the present elements (houses, mountains, seas, boats, people, etc.) according to my taste and necessities!
By the look of it we already knew it could only be German!
Anyway, we quickly noticed that this motorhome seemed uninhabited. Over the three days we stayed there we never saw anybody getting in or out. The first day I thought the owners were the people under the yellow parasol, but they went somewhere else at the end of the day. Eventually we became so curious that we risked some furtive glances through the windows, but most of them were covered with carpets and weird stuff and we couldn’t see anything.We gradually started thinking wild stories, stuff like drug dealers, or that the owners were dead inside, murdered, or had perhaps committed suicide!
Well, at the end of the fourth day, as we came back from a long wandering trip through the surrounding mountains and came closer to the beach, we both stopped, amazed, and I screamed:
“The German motorhome has moved!”
And indeed it was parked next to us. But as before , there was nobody to be seen and the carpets were still hanging by the windows and the cab. It really looked like as if the motorhome had moved by itself… believe me, it was very spooky!
I spent the rest of the evening painting in the Boomobile, with my glance regularly turned to the German motor home. It was like dead. But suddenly, just before nightfall, something happened. I saw hands coming out of the carpets, first one, then 2, then 3 and 4, .. 4 hands wildly waving around and 2 of them soon grasping to the steering wheel, and one hand even venturing out to adjust the wing mirror. And then we heard the engine start, and I saw the driver’s face, and the passenger … , two young girls, well, one really girly and the other a severe looking punk. You can draw your own conclusions, if you want! And within one minute they were gone in their funny motorhome.
That’s all… you might think, it’s not much, but believe me, it was quite surrealistic!
I hope that one day these girls will find this post and tell me if my own conclusions were correct… 
By Miki
All artists members of travelscapers are invited to participate to our travel blog. You can write here about your travels, about the paintings or sketches you do when you travel. About your experience with people, or with the elements of nature when you travel and paint, whatever connects you, the travelling artist, to your art and to the world you are travelling through.
And if you already have a travel painting blog somewhere else, you can post it here too, making a new post with a link to your blog, or posting the whole text.
I know that most of you won’t be able to do that. It is already great that you can find the time and the patience to go through the uploading process to share your paintings with us. But well, some might find the time, the energy and above all the pleasure to do it. I can’t even promise myself to be able to post regularly But I will try, simply because I love the idea of sharing my art travel experience with you all.
And anyway: all the big travellers from history had a travel diary. This is a must! This is why, we, travelscapers, travelling all around the world, we must have one too!
Ok, that’s it for now. If you want to be able to write some posts sometime, it is quite simple. Just leave a comment here, or email me at miki@travelscapers.com and I will do the necessary.
Happy travelling and happy painting!
Artistically yours,
Your travel guide
Miki
