face / façade

sketches of anatolia

And at last, here are some of the sketches from my adventure on The Great Anatolian Road Trip this summer, which were shared at the Carnets de Voyages exhibition in Toulouse. These drawings take you from Mevlana's final resting place in Konya to the ongoing archaeological dig at Çatalhöyük— from the quiet hills of Akseki, to Gaziantep's sun-bleached pistachio orchards.

vernissage

And suddenly, it came— those thousands of dots of ink, the lines frantically scratched with pencil under a cloud of tear gas, the washes of colour laid onto paper in the heat of a Mesopotamian sun— the opening night of the Carnets de Voyages exhibition. I was overwhelmed by a funny mix of joy, excitement, nerves, and disbelief. The crowd came in, and I struggled to find the words to explain my drawings, but fortunately I was introduced to a lovely translator who freed me from jumbling everything up with my clumsy French.

You can see my ink drawings on the walls above, with both my sketchbooks and Pedro's in the plexiglass cases on the tables below. There was even an iPad rigged to one of the tables for swiping through our books...



And how wonderful to show our sketches beside the beautiful work of Christophe Pons, Frédéric Rudant, and Maya Andersson:



The last three photos were taken by Pierre— merci Pierre.
Et merci Martine!

basilica

it's all in the sauce

Everyone knows that the words "French" and "food" are so tightly tied together, so we expected we would eat well in Toulouse. Our first night was an exploration of hearty, regional cuisine— a delicious duck cassoulet for me, and a tender hunk of pork in a honey sauce for Pedro, followed by a warm apple pie drizzled in chocolate.



The following night we dined on a delicately curried seafood salad, and Moules Marinières with frites— the sauce was so good that it was easy to spy fellow patrons scooping it up with the empty shells and sucking it out with a slurp!

toc toc!

brick on a november day

setting up

The Centre Culturel Bellegarde is such a beautiful place to have an exhibition, and I am honoured to have been included in the Carnets de Voyages en Orient show— to have my scribbles among the elegant watercolours of Christophe Pons, the dark and mysterious graphite explorations of Frédéric Rudant, and the sensual, dreamy landscapes of Maya Andersson.



It was so much fun to show with Pedro— I have long admired his work.