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Ever since I read about St Bridget of Sweden making a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in the 1300s, I have wanted to experience and discover what such a long walk does to a person. This September, it became a reality. We walked the easier south-to-north route from the Portuguese border up to Compostela. 

I like driving a bit fast when it is safe to do that. It is a bit of a thrill. However, on this pilgrimage I found that there is much to be said in favor of slow traveling. There is a story about the explorer Livingstone which goes like this: He was determined to get from A to B, so much that suddenly his native guide sits down and refuses to go further. When Livingstone asked what was the matter, the guide responded: We have been going so fast that I must wait for my soul to catch up with my body.

There is wisdom in that, I discovered. When you move step by step through the hilly landscape, your soul stays with you, and a peace of mind settles on you.

Eventually we arrived in Santiago de Compostela, and I was lucky to find the cathedral dramatically lit by the brilliant sunshine. I immediately knew I would paint that scene.

As usual, I do careful planning of my paintings before I even put the canvas on the easel.

This is a rough plan for the darks and lights -- for the abstract shapes underlying the composition of the painting:

And as you can see in A below, I stuck to the plan, as I started with the underpainting of the shadows:

B shows the first layers of paint on top of the underpainting. It is hard to see when the image is this small, but every area of paint has multiple colors in it. The sky, for example, has blues, violets, greens and warmer yellows.

In this painting I used brushes, and mixed most of the paint on the palette. That was the only way for me to keep track of all the detail in the cathedral -- not that I painted every detail, I merely suggested the larger features.

Finally, I thought I had finished the painting. I let it sit overnight, and the next day I discovered that I had to make a few changes. The lady in the bottom right corner (green arrow below) demanded too much attention. I really wanted here there, as she represented how I felt after a long day's walk: too warm, old, bigger than normal, and needing support, but also with uplifted spirits. I had to put my emotions aside, and think of what was best for the painting, and sadly, she had to go.

Originally, I had planned to include a person sitting on the stairs (the spot by the pink arrow). It didn't look right either, so I fixed that. 

Now I had a big blueish empty space in the bottom right corner, and likewise in the upper left quadrant (yellow arrow). I had to change that somehow. First, I thought I might put some birds in the sky, as there are always doves circling cathedrals. But, no. Again, I felt that living birds would direct too much attention where I didn't want it. The most natural thing that would be there, but in reality almost invisible as it is so expected, would be a cloud. Yes, that solved that problem.

Then I checked my edges carefully, added a bit more contrast and colour to the right tower of the cathedral, and was done.

Emotionally, this painting is a summation of the whole pilgrimage. The towers of the cathedral stretch upward toward the heavens, flaming against the sky. The foreground represents the earthlier concerns, and the very good food and well-earned and well-deserved rests we had at restaurants and cafés. The man sitting at the table is speaking in his smartphone. In our smartphones we had maps and instructions for each part of the route. What is highly modern is existing in the midst of millennia old faith, medieval churches and Baroque cathedrals.

I found this "welcoming committee" (hence the title Welcome") at the doorstep of my neighbors -- a pretty arrangement of rusty pots and flowers that caught my eye. I could paint it from the comfort of my own open studio window, which I found to be very neat.

The ironwork of the table was so complicated that I took a photo and then made a grid on the canvas, in order to get the drawing right. The rest is drawn by hand.

I'm in the process of testing water soluble/mixable oils, and have bought only a few colors. A warm cad red, a cool rose red; a cad yellow and a lemon yellow; one magenta; plus french ultramarine, cobalt blue, and cerulean blue.  All other colors are mixed from these, plus zink white and titanium white.

To get a rusty orange, I mixed lemon yellow and magenta, and added tiny bits of other colors to get the exact nuance I wanted, for example. The objects and the doorstep all overlap each other in succession, which also helps create depth.

The structure of the painting

The idea was to make the objects stand out against the pale background in shadow as well as in light, almost as if the objects were silhouetted against the wall.

As usual, I started with an underpainting of pure colors. Following the fat on lean rule, I mixed the paint with a bit of water. The next day, I found that the underpainting had dried almost completely, and so it was easy to apply thicker paint on top of it. Below you see clearly where there is only underpainting, and where I have built up color (the wall and the door):

The challenge with the background was to make the pale blue of the wall different from the white of the door. For their shadow aspects I chose ultramarine for the blue wall, and cobalt blue for the door. In reality, these colors are optically mixed with strokes of violets, greens, and desaturated rusts too. Then I chose paler and warmer versions for the light areas.

In the next image, I have completed all the larger areas, having worked on depth and 3D. The next phase will be handling details, and adding flowers.

At this point, I notice that I have made an irritating mistake. The line of the table meets up with the cast shadow on the door, and together they form a long line that leads the eye out of the painting:

It took until the last stage of the painting to notice the mistake. It is funny how the brain works, as I know all too well that having lines line up is a no-no. I simply didn't see it, but I'm glad I caught it in time. So I fixed that and proceeded with flowers and details. The legs and scrolls of the table got different colors for what is nearer and what is further away. More blue and pale for what is in (an admittedly small) distance, and more red and contrast for what is nearer to the viewer. My point is that even when the depth in the painting is shallow, one can use the tricks for creating distance in an landscape to make a still life seem more 3D.

I use color first to create an illusion of roundness of objects, and value and chroma second. Take the watering can for example:

It started as two flat shapes showing light and shadow. In the middle image it is still flat, but I have adjusted the colors a bit, in preparation for the layers of paint that will give it the 3D look of the rightmost image. I put the warmest most intense red in the half-light (where shadow and light transition) in order to give the illusion of a rounded cylinder-shape.

The watering can was as intensely pinkish red as the flowers (and is meant to balance the flowers). However, when I mixed the reds, I was not satisfied with the result. To the right of the image below are the reds mixed with white zink white, and as you see they become greyed and rather dull:

The solution was to use a transparent painting medium, which allowed the color full chroma in thin glazed layers (left above). These were used for both the can and the flowers.

Below is the progress of the whole painting:

Click here to see a large version of the finished painting.