My “retreat” of the past few days turned out to be the strangest experience. It started poorly because on the first day away I was supposed to run my wife to the health spa she was booked to attend while I “retreated”. There was some confusion about the actual address of the place, and I got into a blue funk temporarily fearing that the whole carefully crafted plan was about to fall apart. It was OK in the end, but my nerves were shredded by the time I got back to my cottage.
One of the things I like to do on these retreats is to walk, and it turned out that however well-situated the place in relation to every other activity I wanted to do, it was not a good place for a landscape artist. It was in an area of thoroughly boring arable land, with more wildlife in my garden than in the “countryside”. What is more, it was in earshot of both the M1 (the primary route between London and Edinburgh) and Luton airport. Peace was going to be in short supply!
Eventually I did realise how I might fulfil my hopes for the artistic side of the trip. In the peace of inside the cottage I set up a still life, modelled deliberately on the work of the great Italian painter Giorgio Morandi, composed of an array of jugs, bottles, a salt pot and a glass. It was a great exercise, demanding care in the initial composition, enormous discipline in observation, and a good deal of manual control. I was rather pleased with the result, even though I had not made the best choice of paper on which to do the drawing (too coarse-grained.) I emerged from the experience with enhanced respect for Morandi (whom I admire greatly anyway) and a experience of a new discipline.