The Holiday Sketchbook

A picture heavy post!

Thank you so much for the kind comments and messages after my post last week. Still plodding along, still laughing and still waiting for the pacemaker! But a less frantic week so I have managed to dig out my sketchbook and look back over my holiday.

When sat with a sketchbook in front of iconic views or stunning scenery there is a temptation to feel one should be making beautiful drawings that do the scene justice, and I am certain that many artists are able to do just that. I would love a sketchbook filled with beautiful renditions of stunning vistas or interesting street scenes that I could translate into paintings on my return home. But it really doesn’t work like that for me and invariably I am disappointed with what I draw. It frustrates me and I feel pangs of failure which has resulted in many abandoned holiday sketchbooks over the years with just an odd page or two filled. Please tell me I am not alone in hoarding boxes full of barely started sketchbooks. And it has taken all those years of feeling frustrated and disappointed with myself to realise that I’m just not that sort of artist and it is the quirky things that can tell a story that are what interest me and these are the things that conjure up the memories of a holiday.

This is the same for any drawing I do when I’m out and about. Last summer I joined a plein air painting group. Our first meeting was high up with a vista across heathland and while the others captured the distant landscape, I found a spot on the edge of some woodland and drew the tree trunks, because I liked the way they twisted together.

When we met in a beautiful garden with stunning borders filled with summer flowers, I got up close to draw the spikey stems of eryngium and when we met on an industrial estate to sketch some urban architecture it was the glamorous petite woman driving a pink HGV that caught my attention. It could be I’m just a bit of a rebel at heart, but I like to think I’m searching for a different narrative.

On our recent holiday, I was determined not to go down the usual route of trying to sketch landscapes and failing. I admit on our second day when we sailed down the Rhine Gorge through tree lined slopes dotted with fairy tale castles the temptation to capture the scenery was strong and I made three or four very uninspiring sketches, but most of all it was the less artistic vistas that caught my attention. So as promised, these are just a few of my favourite things, in a quick tour through some of the pages of my sketchbook.

In almost every place we stopped there was the opportunity for free time to wander and grab a coffee or occasionally a beer. In Heidelberg the coffee shop seemed to be situated at the beginning of the last century, with its quaint old fashioned shelves lined with jars, teapots and beautiful cups. Each cup featured different artwork with a modern design and my cappuccino had milk so frothy it looked like a swirl of meringue on the top of my coffee. I could have happily sat there all day drawing the different designs on the cups, but we had a ship to catch!

In Koblenz our coffee came in elegant pots. We weren’t sure what we were ordering, with Stewart’s German being a bit rusty and mine non-existent and we ended up paying 14 euros for the privilege of those individual coffee pots. Needless to say we savoured every last drop.

And in the quaint town of Rüdesheim we sampled the local speciality, a Rüdesheimer Kaffee, a concoction of local Asbach brandy, heated and set alight with three sugar lumps, topped up with hot coffee and finished a dollop of whipped cream and dark chocolate shavings. A local variation of what I have always known as an Irish coffee, this was apparently invented by German TV chef Hans Carl Adam back in 1957, who was described to us as a German Jamie Oliver. It was prepared at our table with theatrical flourish by girl in traditional German dress and served in beautiful, shaped ceramic cups with matching saucers. I wish I had bought one to bring home but it’s probably for the best that I’m not making and drinking these coffees on a regular basis. Delicious though they were, they were also very potent!

Something that became apparent very quickly was that they do like a statue in Germany. There are of course in every town the usual dignitaries celebrated in bronze, but we also discovered many statues dedicated to ordinary people and I soon became fascinated by their stories. They were also ideal subjects to draw, given that I like to draw people and these particular people stayed still and were happy to pose… all day if necessary!

In the old town of Koblenz there are a number of statues celebrating the lives of ordinary yet ‘special’ citizens, one in particular being Anne Marie Stein. Anne Marie lived in Koblenz in the 1920s and in the evening would make her way around the bars and pubs of Koblenz selling peppermint (Pfefferminz in German) to raise money to feed the stray cats and dogs of which she was particularly fond. She also liked to pick up brandy and cigars in the bars, enjoying a little tipple and a smoke. She died in 1940 and the statue was erected in her memory featuring a cat and a dog at her feet, a cigar in her hand and a basket of peppermints (which I thought looked like knitting yarn!) over her arm. It is called the Pfefferminzje statue as Anne Marie couldn’t say the word properly due to her missing front teeth.

The other well-known statue in Koblenz is the Schangelbrunner, also known as the naughty boy of Koblenz, who randomly spits water at passers-by. He is not based on any particular boy but reminded us of a lad we both know, in looks not because he spits!

I especially loved this statue of a well known resident of Boppard, Else Heimburger giving sweets to a little boy. Else owned a sweet shop that was loved by the children of Boppard, and her statue stands outside the site of what was her shop, although it is now a pizza restaurant. Our local guide told us that Else didn’t actually like children very much, but although the guide was a lovely, jolly and absolutely hilarious lady, she seemed to be making up stories left, right and centre so I’m not sure how true that was.

Although there were many other similar statues everywhere we went, I didn’t draw them all, but this odd couple caught my eye in Cologne. These are Tünnes and Schäl two legendary citizens of Cologne who didn’t actually exist. They were puppets invented by Johann Cristoph Winter who was the owner of a puppet theatre, the Hänneschen Theatre established in 1802. Tünnes is good natured but Schäl, the taller of the two who is always seen dressed in a tailcoat, is considered two faced and crafty, frequently conning his friend. This is represented by his squint eyes. It is said that rubbing the nose of the Tünnes statue brings good luck and as a result it was been worn very shiny indeed.

Another statue that I particularly loved was in Mannheim alongside the absolutely stunning Jesuit church. Not of any local legends this time but of an angel, another of my favourite themes. I do like an angel! This one is the ‘Angel of Peace’ which is a memorial for the victims of Nazi Germany, although locals call her Die schepp' Liesel, or The Crooked Liesel, no doubt due to her somewhat diagonal stance. She was created by sculptor Gerhard Marcks in 1951-52

Angels caught my eye in other towns too. Heidelberg is a famous university town and it also boasts a unique building, ‘a student prison’ or Studentenkarzer . It was established in the 1780s and was in operation right up until the start of the first world war. Students would be incarcerated for a variety of minor transgressions, such as drunken behaviour, loud singing in the street, knocking a policeman’s hat off with a stick or illegal fencing duels. Although I imagine those last three probably counted as drunken behaviour. However, staying in the prison was not a real hardship as students could still attend lectures as long as they returned afterwards, plus they were served food and alcoholic drink as well as being allowed their manservants and visitors, and they could have textbooks and art supplies brought in.

Every little bit of the dark walls and ceilings are covered in paintings and graffiti which is currently in the process of being restored. This jaunty little angel or perhaps it is more of a cherub, caught my eye! The prison was made famous by Mark Twain on a trip to Europe in 1878, when he wrote

“It is questionable if the world’s criminal history can show a custom more odd than this”

Although I still have a very much unfinished sketchbook it has a lot more pages than usual filled and I’m determined to carry it with me on future travels, when I seek out more stories and interesting snippets of information.

And for those of you interested in my portable sketching kit this is what I usually carry around with me. It is often tempting to take way too much, especially when travelling by car or train without luggage restrictions, but experience has taught me, most of it doesn’t get used. So I have a small sturdy plastic box in which I take a selection of pencils in different grades – a HB, B, 2B and 4B are usually all I need. I like to have at least three or four waterproof fine liners plus a brush pen and selection of water soluble pencil crayons and felt tips for colour. I also take a brush with a water reservoir, a pencil sharpener, a small 15 cm ruler, an eraser, a glue stick and a pair of scissors and that is it. Oh and a sketchbook of course. These do vary from pocket sized books that are usually too small to the one I brought along on this latest holiday, an A4 portrait format book from Seawhites of Brighton. It was too big to fit in my small backpack along with my pencil box, but I found that it wasn’t a hardship to carry it. I also have a small watercolour palette designed for travel that I popped into my bag, but I didn’t actually use it. I will quite happily work into pages with different materials when I get home and the wings of the Heidelberg cherub were painted with yellow gouache on our return for example.

There were more angels that caught my eye on this trip, but they didn’t end up in my sketchbook while we were away, however I might tell you about them next week.