Seven port views plus a lighthouse

Sometime after my first week of touring in Crete, I gave up on posting remotely. I am just never satisfied with images that are photographed from my iPhone. I much prefer to scan paintings on my trusty Epson Perfection V600 scanner, clean the images up in Photoshop (bring the whites back to white, make sure the colour matches the original, etc.) and then post them. So here I am, one week after returning home, finally over the jet lag and back at my desk scanning paintings and sketches.

In all, I painted 8 views around the Old Venetian Port of Chania, Crete (mostly 16″ x 12″). I originally thought it was seven but then realized that my final painting of the lighthouse is really the entrance to the historic port so I added that to the count. There would have been a ninth view if it hadn’t rained on my last day. Forgive me if you have already seen a few of these but the colour is not accurate in the previous images so here they are again.

I could paint this port for a year or more and never get tired of it. If you look it up on Google maps you’ll see that it has several bays. The one on the western side is lined with shops and restaurants and it has a wide strolling promenade. The eastern side is where you’ll find the docks and the boats — little fishing boats, great white yachts and catamarans, speedboats that you can charter to take you to beaches inaccessible by car, and strangely, a mini red submarine that allows you to have an underwater view if you choose. You’ll also find the remaining Neoria there. These are the old Venetian shipyards with the peaked facades that you can see in the third painting below.

On the outer edges of the port there’s also a long, narrow seawall that takes you to the lighthouse. I painted in a shaded spot along that wall for several of these paintings. In all of these, I tried to convey a sense of architectural history (bits of the remaining Byzantine and Roman walls, the clay-roofed colourful Venetian buildings, the only remaining Ottoman mosque that forms the corner of the Western section of the port) as well as a sense of what the port is like at different times of day. I was there during the period around Easter when it’s quite crowded so I included lots of people, but I imagine that a place as beautiful as this is crowded well into the autumn.

It was wonderful to live a bit like a local for a few weeks in Chania — to set off in the morning with my palette and easel in my backpack, not knowing where in the port I would stop to paint. I don’t think I’ve ever had the luxury of so much painting time in any other place.

In the next post: the sketches from our frequent road trips to different villages in western Crete.