Opera Singing...

Around this time of year I get a very strong longing for the Greek sea. I know it's not before too long that I will be seeing it again, but that fact makes the longing even stronger. When I think of the sea there are different things that come to my mind, the sea itself, but also the things I could be doing around the sea. I think of painting landscapes on an island, of swimming, of fishing, of being on a big boat, of snorkeling, of looking on the beach and very prominently, a difficult to describe sense of the sea, I guess mainly its smell and feel and the whole atmosphere surrounding it. All these notions are mixed up in my mind, creating a sense of the sea that does not really exist in that way, an amalgamation of my best sensations and memories of it, spreading through the years and mixed from different places and from different islands. The sense of the sea grows deeper for me each year, more experiences and memories adding to it, so that it seems that eventually the longing for it will become unbearable.

Painting on an island is a very strong part of this longing. Many times I have visited an island having decided not to do any painting at all and just have a quiet break and do some fishing. But before long the urge becomes too strong and I find myself looking desperately for any kind of materials to buy and borrow so I can start painting. It has become such an integral part of being near the sea, on an island, that I can hardly consider painting alone, without thinking at the same time of the sea. That has caused me a series of problems. When I paint on an island, I paint from direct observation and the "act" of painting becomes a very complex experience. I have to arrange the equipment in advance making sure the final bundles are not too heavy, but still include plenty of drinking water. Then I have to start relatively early before it gets too hot. I need to walk quite a distance and occasionally climb to get to the spot I want to. Then I need to make sure I do not get carried away and spend too much time in the sun or sit at the same spot for too long and hurt my back. Then the whole practical issues of getting back again without destroying the painting on the way and maybe stopping for a swim as well. Memories of days are mixed up with painting, swimming, sweat and bush scratches, exhaustion and a deep feeling of achievement. Even when the painting is no good.

This experience of panting is very hard to recreate anywhere else. Moreover, after starting to work from direct observation as a kid, I realised that the paintings I did that way were much better than the ones I did from photographs at home. So painting now in my mind is strangely connected with the sea, with direct observation and with "direct marks", meaning applying paint with brushes on a surface (for more on that see the post Direct and Indirect Marks). Because of this, painting at home away from the sea means that I often use "indirect marks" and work with collages and other techniques, avoiding to paint anything from a photograph using paints and brushes. This obscure situation is very comical and I often break this silly state of affairs by indulging in some photograph painting from the comforts of the house.

When I was a kid, an opera singer used to live in the same block of flats as we did. His name was George Pappas and we often heard him practicing. We even got tickets to see him sing twice and I think those performances were the start of my love for Opera. But before that, when I was really young, my uncle used to come and pick me up in his red van to drive me to my cousins' place for Christmas. We often got stuck in traffic and my uncle used to put on Opera cassettes for us to hear. He always put Rigoletto, L'elisir d'Amore and the Barber of Seville. And then he told me that he was singing in them. That he was an Opera singer and the voice on the cassette was actually him singing. And I believed him. He talked about his performances and his travels and how he could not sing for me as he had to preserve his voice for his next performance. I was in absolute amazement that I had an uncle who was an Opera singer!

When I grew up a bit, I asked my father about it and about getting tickets to see him singing. My father laughed and laughed and said my uncle could not sing to save his soul! He had no rhythm at all and he had been pulling my leg all this time. I remember that instead of being angry or disappointed I was quite intrigued that my uncle had made such an effort to convince me of his Opera singing abilities. So from that point onward, I continued to pretend that I believed my uncle was an Opera singer when we were in the van and he kept on putting an act on, and we listened and listened to the cassettes of Opera years after years, making it a joke and a game between us.

These following paintings of the Jubilee Boat Parade are done from photographs, taken from the television screen, with acrylic paint, on boards. They are the complete antithesis of what I consider a genuine painting experience for me personally. They were done in the night, with poor light, on the living room floor. However, there was a secret indulgence involved when painting them, reminding me a bit of how I enjoyed listening to the Opera in my uncle's van, even when knowing that it was not him singing. It is the satisfaction of being able to essentially enjoy the act of painting itself, cut away from my own set conceptions surrounding it. And of retrieving this enjoyment in the most unlikely for myself circumstances, in the most unorthodox for me fashion.

In memory of George Pappas (1938-2012)

In search of the river

When we were kids, my two cousins and I often spent our Easter holidays at my father's small stone and wooden house in a tiny village on top of a high mountain in the Peloponnese. Our memories from those holidays are filled with adventures, wild creatures, meat cooked in the fireplace, an array of unforgettable characters and some very loyal friends. Our memories are also strangely intermingled with those of my father's and of his friends', as we spent a lot of time listening to old stories and old adventures. So much so, that sometimes it is hard to distinguish what really happened to us and what had happened to my father and to his friends when they were kids. It seemed at the time that whatever we did and whatever adventures we had, nothing ever came close enough to what they had done as kids. Somehow, every night their stories seemed so much more exciting than ours. Most of them were, except maybe for one, which has been very much talked of in the family since and because of which we all got into some considerable trouble.

Amongst the stories they used to talk about, one stood out and came up again and again. It was about five of them going on a search for a wild river, which ran quite deep down into the valley, below our house. The melted snow of the winter used to run wild in it from the high mountain tops and its best part was deep down below, hidden into the valley. The river was not visible from above as our house stood quite high up on the mountain, on the side of a steep hill. It was very hard to estimate how far down the river was and which was the best way to get to it. The vegetation and plants were very wild in the area. They described the river as this amazing running force, with fish, frogs and crabs in it. How they had fished and caught crabs and cooked them and how they had swam in it. It all sounded so adventurous! We could not have even imagined that a river existed in that area, let alone that it had fish and crabs in it.

One year when I was around ten years old and my cousins were around nine and eleven, I convinced them that we should go in search of that river, to see if it really was anything like what the grown ups were describing and to come back from our adventure with a much better story than theirs. We decided to do that in secret so that we could surprise everyone and return with evidence that we had found the famous river. We prepared our rucksacks in advance the night before. My cousins had the bright idea of taking with us every single gadget that existed in the house. If you saw our rucksacks you would think we were going to mount Everest. They took my uncle's walkie-talkies, his torch, my fathers army binoculars, my father's Zenit photographic camera (to take photos for evidence that we had gone to the river), a heavy double-glass insulated Thermos filled only with water, my uncle's ski gloves, an umbrella, a blanket, ear muffs, a tin of cookies and two pairs of ski glasses. The rucksacks were so heavy that even carrying them to the top of the main path was a bit of a struggle. We woke up early, at six, and left the house like thieves, one by one in the dark, with the rucksacks dragging us down and our thick rubber boots and knee high socks on. We left a note for the grown ups announcing that we would be back for dinner and that we had gone on an excursion.

Rucksack

The day seemed bright enough to begin with, but the previous night a very heavy rain had fallen, so that the earth was really soft and in places muddy puddles blocked the path. We decided to keep to the main path all the way around the first hill and then to start descending, about after an hour's walk. Just before we reached that spot, a huge muddy puddle blocked the road so much that there was no way around it. On one side a very abrupt rock stood high and on the other side a steep precipice lurked. So we decided that my older cousin should try and jump across and then we could throw our rucksacks over to him and cross too, by placing one foot in the centre of the puddle and then swing the other leg across it. My older cousin managed to cross, but kneeled near the edge of the puddle so that his trousers were covered in mud. My younger cousin went next, and placed his one leg in the mud. Then he stretched the second one all the way across to the other side. But when he went to move the first foot from the mud, the mud kept the boot stuck in it and his foot came off with the sock, he lost his balance and fell sideways into the mud. It was so funny, but it really took us about half an hour to get him out and then get me across. He was covered in thick, cold mud and his boots and socks were covered in mud inside and out. I dropped my rucksack in the mud and so it had doubled in weight. We thought about turning back at that point, as we were only an hour away, but we all voted against it.

Boots

The descent down was a bit chaotic and arbitrary, as we took whatever path around the vegetation and trees seemed the easiest. There was no noting which way we were going. The downhill force was accelerating, we were hopping down rather than walking. Half way down the abrupt slopes, the weather changed. It changed so fast, that within a matter of a couple of hours, a thick mist came into the deep valleys, the grey clouds hiding behind it, and a ferocious rain started to fall. It soon turned dark and a thunderstorm broke out. We had no idea of where we were or which way the river was. So we kept on galloping downwards, guessing that we should at some point come across the river by default. We were soaking wet by that point, but still in good spirits. At some point we heard the river roaring through the thunderstorm. It was a grey, angry river, with tonnes of water running through it. No chance to see any crabs or fish in that water and no way to cross it. Any stepping stones were covered by the angry water.

My older cousin opened the umbrella and secured it at the edge of the river and then took out his socks and trousers and started rinsing the mud off. We were so scared that we were going to be told off by my grandmother for dirtying our clothes so much, that my younger cousin and I also took our socks and trousers off to wash them. The water was freezing and my cousin lost one of his socks and one of his brother's socks to the current. The trousers would not dry of course and then lightning came and struck on the opposite side of the river, on a tall pine tree, making a tremendous noise afterwards. So there we were, kind of lost, wet and freezing to the bone, half covered in mud and with an umbrella open during a thunderstorm. We realised that eventually and we closed it. By that time we had started to be a bit worried. We had found the river, but everything else had gone wrong.

The way back was one of the scariest things that has ever happened to me. It was very dark from the mist and you could not see any further than two metres ahead. The rain would not stop, it was cold and the noise of the thunderstorm and the the rainfall was very distracting and covered our voices. I could hear nothing but a horrible loud buzzing. It all had an urgent edge to it. We soon realised that there was no way to find out the way that we had come, so we decided to go straight up instead. Straight up was a hill that had turned into pure clay and mud from the rainfall. It was covered in a kind of reed that grew in the form of metre tall bushes with sharp long spikes. Every time we tried to grab hold of one of those bushes in order to pull ourselves upwards, the bush would come out of the earth by its roots. It was almost impossible to climb up. It took us half an hour to move up ten metres. The weight of the rucksacks and the mud sticking on the boots were dragging us down, back towards the river. At some point my younger cousin slipped and rolled so far down, it took him twenty minutes to get back to where we were. At some places the boots immersed into the mud more than half way so that you had to take your foot out and pull with both hands to dislodge them. At that point we started to panic and decided to drop the equipment. We threw the binoculars away, then the walkie-talkies, soon the torch, then the gloves, the blanket, the umbrella and finally the ski glasses and ear muffs. We kept the Thermos with the water, the tin of biscuits and my father's camera.

By that time it was dark because the night was falling. We started to hear gun shots, so we knew they were looking for us. My eldest cousin could work out from the noise which way to go and at some point, somehow, we reached the top and we found ourselves on the main path. We were walking in an automatic way; ours legs were moving by themselves and we had kept a distance between us. My eldest cousin was walking ahead, with an empty rucksack, bloody hands and scratched up face and completely wet. I was following about ten metres behind. My boots were very heavy, a thick layer of clay stuck to them. I could hardly move my feet, I was just dragging them. I was completely covered in mud. My younger cousin was behind me, with only one boot, no rucksack and bloody feet. Two of us were crying and I think we were unable to speak. At some point we saw my father's car. It approached from the opposite direction, beeping and stopped next to my eldest cousin. We found the strength to kind of run towards it, me and my younger cousin. My father saw us and pointed to the house. He said it was very near, we were almost there. There was no way he was going to let us get into the car in the state we were in. Those last metres were the longest I have ever walked.

Car

We spend the night next to the fire place. All our clothes were destroyed by the mud and my youngest cousin suffered a horrible cold as a result of the whole thing. We were in a lot of trouble for taking and losing all the equipment and for sneaking out without letting anyone know what we were up to. I was in the most of trouble for that. Somewhere amongst all the anger and disappointment, I think they were very happy to see us back and well. And since then they always throw in this story amongst their own old ones. It's so funny, I can hardly remember the river as we saw it on that day, but we all remember the one with the fish and the crabs and the frogs and the one everyone swam in.

Fireplace

Bed

Direct and Indirect Marks

When we were little, my cousin and I used to spend what felt like hours, looking at the way the waves came into the sandy and pebbled beach. When a big wave broke on the seashore some of its sea water continued moving upwards into the beach, like a reversed little river. We loved to watch which way those liquid tongues would choose, whether they would branch out and how far they would go before the sea water was absorbed by the sand. It seemed to us that the sea water took the easiest and most natural way through the pebbles and sand and we loved to try and predict which would be its path before the next wave broke. Most times, after the first wave had broken and a wet, river like path was established, the following rounds of sea water would follow the same path, making the grooves in the sand deeper and smoother every time. Then a huge wave would come and erase all rivery paths, and the game would start again with a new terrain ready for guessing.

I have often thought that something very similar happens in my head. There are some thoughts and ideas that seem to have formed grooves in my mind, so that I have been thinking this or that way for a long time without really be conscious of it. These ideas must have once found an easy path through, so that they are now so well established, they feel natural, as if they were always there. Because of that they are comfortable ideas and should be at least challenged, if not redirected once in a while, even just for fun.

One such idea of mine, very personal and by no means objective, is that in Art there are direct and indirect marks. I find it quite hard to explain what I mean by that to someone else, as I normally just know when I look at something what I would consider a direct or an indirect mark. I am not sure why that would be important and why or when I started to make this distinction in my head. But it is something that I would think of almost as soon as I see a piece of work. I think that applying paint or another substance with a brush directly onto a surface would definitely in my mind be a direct mark. And I know that I would consider a collage, anything stuck onto a surface, an indirect mark. Other things, like stamps, etchings, screen prints and anything that might have been designed by hand, but then is transferred onto another surface, would also count in my head as an indirect mark. As would be paint thrown onto a canvas. But paint applied by hand or brush would be a direct mark.

I do not attribute more importance to one type of mark versus the other and I enjoy working with both individually. My problem is that I find it hard to mix, what I perceive as, direct and indirect marks in my own work. I find it hard to paint on top of collages and I find it even harder to stick things on top of a painting. I have made one oil painting which is done on stuck newspapers as a background. In the same painting there are some drawings of boats and houses, done on small pieces of paper which have been then stuck onto the painting and blended in with paint. Because these were drawn by hand they don't count in my mind as collaged pieces/indirect marks, although they still are in fact collaged by definition. I am not sure what kinds of marks this painting has (I guess both direct and indirect) and that bothers me a bit about it, but also makes me excited that I have mixed them up.

When it comes to sculpture things are a bit reversed. There I consider anything making a three-dimensional shape a direct mark, whether something is carved by hand or made up of found objects. But any paint applied on top of the final arrangement afterwards, for me would be an indirect mark.  I don't recall ever having mixed, what I consider, direct and indirect marks in my own sculptures and I am ashamed to say that it sometimes bothers me in other people's work as well, when a sculpture has been painted on top afterwards. A sculpture, say made by layers of thick paint sandwiched together, would be fine and it would be in my mind a direct mark. The more I have been trying to explain all this here, the more and more I realise that it must sound at best weird and obsolete and at worse plain rubbish and ludicrous. But nevertheless this is how I perceive things and that is what I have to work with.

I was recently invited to an event organised by the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, to raise awareness of the plans to renovate Hatton Gallery and to restore Merzbarn Wall, which is permanently on display in Hatton Gallery. The gallery itself and Kurt Schwitters' wall are such a big part of the students' life at the Art Department, that I often catch myself missing this particular piece of work; it feels very familiar. As part of this event, we saw the exhibition Schwitters in Britain at Tate Britain and that is what brought all these thoughts up. Kurt Schwitters' collages are a mixture of everything, paper, bits of things, wood sometimes and paint as well. And I remembered how much I like them when I saw this exhibition. For him it seems, everything used was a mark and everything was valid as a mark in its own right. In his own words: "The word Merz denotes essentially the combination of all conceivable materials for artistic purposes, and technically the principal of equal evaluation of the individual materials...A perambulator wheel, wire-netting, string and cotton wool are factors having equal rights with paint. The artist creates through the choice, distribution and metamorphosis of the materials". There is no fear there of covering something up with paint or of mixing things together. They all seem to work together in his work, especially in his collages.

Kurt Schwitters, AERATED V (1941)

I still find it hard to like the sculptures I saw, which are of plaster and stone and then painted on top. However, what I did feel like when looking at them, was how liberating it would be to try something like that for myself, even if it does not come naturally to me. It would be a bit like a child-like play with things, with materials, without a preconceived idea of what I like and what I dislike. After all, I am used to applying paint when I make three dimensional toys for Aretousa, so why not try the same for what is considered "sculpture".  A friend of mine once suggested that all these ideas about direct and indirect marks and my finding it hard to mix them together, was something to do with "staying true to the medium" I was using or to the "integrity of the medium". I am not sure it is that though, as I never thought of it like that. I think it has something to do with control and my fear of using these things together, when I do not feel in control of creating a satisfying to me result.

Kurt Schwitters, Togetherness (1945-7)

How refreshing would it be though if I did at some point create something that pleases me from the exact things that I now find hard to consider? A bit like a huge wave wiping the terrain clean so that the game can start again. As this is very unlikely to happen of its own accord, I have started a small exercise of making a quick collage and a quick sculpture of two figures, and then passing the control over to Aretousa who can use paint on both the collage and the sculpture. I have retained control of the colours used, but all the paint application would be her own. In a following exercise I hope to attempt a proper collage made of whatever I like but with the addition of paint and also make a sculpture which will be painted on top. This time both will be finished by myself and I will have to make conscious choices of how I choose to mix my "direct and indirect marks". That will be in a future post.

Walthamstow Market

I did not give Walthamstow a fair chance at all. When we moved to the ground floor of a seemingly nice house with a newborn baby, I hardly expected that we would be on the move again within a bit more than six months. Very early on the signs of rising damp appeared, previously hidden by a fresh layer of thick wall paint. Our suspicions were confirmed when the neighbours, who were moving out, told us all about the struggles of the previous tenants of our apartment and how they fought to get out of the contract as the damp had badly affected their health. The owner tried to do some work on the damp walls by drilling holes in them and pumping special stuff into them, but even during the summer months it made very little difference. Stuck between the landlord and a horrendous estate agent from hell, we were caught in a nightmarish, never-ending battle of ignored phone calls, bureaucratic and anal emails and a situation where we had to stay there till the winter, when the damp would be severe enough for us to be able to break the contract without any charges.

One day it just clicked to me that this house was never meant to be there. It was built on a road where it stood out, built at a different time and with a different style. It seemed like it was built where a passage used to be between the houses, maybe an old road. So it was wedged there blocking the previous passage. At the back of the house there was a small concrete garden/parking place, making the road leading to it a dead end. That must have previously been the road that run through, where the house now stood. There was also a gutter there with water always running deep underneath, even if it had not rained. A similar deep gutter, at the front of the house, also had water running vigorously in it. One day we dropped a leaf in the gutter at the back of the house and watched it in disbelief appear in the running water at the front of the house. There was basically water running always underneath this house and when I saw that I knew that no matter what we did we would never be able to get rid of the damp.

So we decided to move out before the winter arrived regardless of the consequences. As a result of this early decision we never unpacked properly, we never settled there and we lived more or less day by day in a suspension, till the time came to leave. Of course we had nowhere to go, but that is a different story. Meanwhile, not very far away, about seven to ten minutes walk from the house, lay Walthamstow Market, apparently the longest street market in Europe. In the early months of motherhood, my basic aim of the day was to get there with the pram and Aretousa and then to get back to the house. Even that house, which was by no means a welcoming place, damp and full of boxes, was my base and there must be some sort of prehistoric instinct at work there, for I never thought I would be so magnetised to return to a house -a safe base- in my life. I was never really into houses and domestic matters, but at the time it signified Aretousa getting a good feed and a shelter from potential rain, cold and wind. So every day I walked with her in the pram to the base of Walthamstow High Street, the very bottom end of the Market. And then I could see all the shops going upwards on the pedestrian street. Charity shops, fruit and vegetable stalls, exotic fabric shops, DIY shops, a supermarket, clothes shops, old cafes, eel shops, tea shops, toy shops, second hand shops and countless stalls selling everything, even bird's milk (this is a Greek expression for more or less anything you could wish for).

But in the beginning I did not make it further than about ten shops' length. It was the most ridiculous thing, but I could not bring myself to go any further away from the house. I really wanted to get to a shop that sold exclusively ribbons from Pakistan. And also I wanted to get to the supermarket, which I could see from the bottom of the street. But I thought that I had already been away for twenty minutes and then it would take me another twenty minutes to get back and Aretousa would be hungry by then and I did not feel very comfortable feeding her outside when I was alone. So I went back and eight times out of ten she was very happy and contented when we got back. But the two times that she was crying and hungry were enough confirmation to me that I did the right thing and did not stay out any longer. By the end of the fourth week there I had made it to the supermarket, which was still less than half way up the Market, but was progress nevertheless. As the weeks passed I made it further up the street and could feel comfortable enough to go into the shops with the pram and have a good look around. Aretousa of course was oblivious to this internal battle to distance myself from that hideous house and indulged in all the colours of the fabrics, the busy noises and music and the people cooing at her.

One day I just forgot myself and suddenly realised I was at the very top of the Market. That was a great day for me and it signified a new sense of freedom. Once I did that there was no stopping me really. I started to go further and further out, trying streets to the right and left of the main Market Street. Also it helped that by then I got to know the rhythms and needs of the baby quite well, which gave me more confidence to work around them. I still feel that I did not properly appreciate Walthamstow and its Market, as it was all darkened by the house situation and I was always in a bit of a rush. Plus I knew I was not going to be there very long so I never let myself really discover the place properly. I cannot quite believe it that even now, thinking of that terrible house still gives me a sense of security, because it sheltered Aretousa in the best way it could -albeit humid and damp-, for the short time we were there. But if I think about it for too long it makes me so angry and furious that people are prepared to keep on putting families through such financial and emotional strain and abusing the property market difficulties for their own gain. It is really quite disgusting.

The funny thing is that when I did make it to the shops of Walthamstow Market, I felt such a sense of accomplishment that I often bought small useless things, just because I had made it into a particular shop. I ended up owning small sections of African batik fabric, Pakistani ribbons, Indian lace, old tennis rackets, books on beetles and the undergrowth, old postcards and I don't even remember what else. Nothing was expensive or valuable, or indeed needed, and I am pretty sure I would have not bought half of those things had I been just visiting the market on a normal occasion. Since moving out from Walthamstow, I have returned to the market but once. A good friend of mine accompanied me and I am afraid to say that I managed to buy something useless this time around too, but with a plan in mind. We came across a man who was selling foam of different colours, the kind you use to upholster chairs. When I saw it I thought of a way I could use it and also use some of the other Walthamstow-time materials to make something of some sense. Several useless items combined together are bound to make something of some use.

The photographs are of the materials used to make four jellyfish for Aretousa, suspended from two old tennis rackets. I wanted to use some small blue and white LED battery operated lights, for the tentacles, but I have not managed to change the circuit so that several lines branch out from the same control box. Without this essential change I could only get one lit tentacle per jellyfish, which was no good. So instead I threaded the lights through a hole on the plastic semi-spherical body of the jellyfish so that they light up that part instead.

IKEA still life #3

This is the third and final soft toy that we own from Ikea which represents food. It's a basket with fruit: an orange cut in half, an apple cut in half, a kiwi cut in half (of which one half has been lost), a slice of watermelon, a bunch of purple grapes and a peel-able banana.

I have stated in a previous post the benefits of having such durable, re-usable and realistic toys, in terms of the way they promote pretend play in a safe way and in terms of being there as a constant, a chance to play with the same items again and again, either learning by repetition or then reinventing a new way to play with the same items and use them each time in a different way. What then in contrast, the real fruits could offer, would be to feel each one as a whole and when cut -its shape, texture, colour, firmness, juiciness and so on- the smell and taste of them, their potential usages when raw or as preserves, jams, pickles and so on and their natural state, their impermanence and eventually their decay.   

The fruit that most conveys these notions for me is the "Vasiliko Syko", the King Fig. It is a variety of large, purple figs of an intense aroma and a rich, beautifully sweet taste. In many parts of Greece figs grow really well, especially in the South, and many times the trees are not even planted by anyone but have grown by themselves in people's fields and gardens. The trees have thick, grey-whitish branches which have prominent knots and strange angled twists. They look rather like an elderly man's long, heavy worked or arthritic fingers. The leaves of the King Fig tree are very large and also resemble a wide open human palm. They have a lovely powdery slate green colour with a very delicate layer of silver downy hair on one side. The whole of a young fig tree looks like stretched arms and hands open wide to give you very generously their fruit. An old fig tree looks like it cannot stand the weight of such a heavy load of fruit any longer, begging you to release it from it, to cut them off before the old knotted limbs succumb to the strain. And that is exactly what we did.

There was a time when I really thought you could spend a whole summer on an island in the Dodecanese eating for free. People had so much extra ripe fruit and vegetables that they were very eager to give it away, lest it went to waste. I remember a typical day, having gone to paint and then for a swim. The intense, burning heat which in the beginning you think you will not be able to stand even for a bit. But by the early afternoon it has gone into you so much that you feel half of your body has evaporated and although you are in a semi dried-out state, it feels like you have always been in the heat, it feels unimaginable that you have ever touched snow or that it even exists. The dragging of the leather sandals, the dried red earth from the path on the dusted legs, then the burning hot sand through the toes, throwing out clothes and dropping equipment and running to jump in the sea. The complete shock of the sea water that in contrast to the body temperature feels freezing. And then the complete and unreasonable need for the heat again. The long walk back and the weight of the equipment and painting having somehow doubled. The hunger in the belly hurting a bit. And then a King Fig tree!

On either side of the road there are fig trees but only one King Fig tree and I can see at least twenty figs. I need to climb an old rusty fence and then stretch and catch four of them. I put them in my top and jump down. I would give the painting and all my equipment just for one mouthful. The first King Fig is blood-purple and very very ripe. The white milk that comes out of the spot where I cut it oozes out. I peel the thick velvety purple skin to reveal the jewel inside. Red, ruby and glistening tiny bits, purple and golden flesh and the best dessert, the best fruit and the best taste in the world. On the way back an old lady shouts out and limply runs behind me to give me a whole bag of little tomatoes. Please could I take them as they are too many for her and they will rot. And nearer the village someone gives me two large courgettes. And just outside the house the neighbour gives me a bag of normal green figs as they will go to waste, he has too many. And the whole day of doing a painting I cannot even see any more outside because my eyes see only white lights, is suddenly worth it. Indoors I can start seeing it again bit by bit and I eat the second King Fig which was even better than the first.

With the real fruit in the basket, we smell and touch and taste them. And then we press them into a slab of clay to see their prints and shape transferred into another object.

I am not sure why after we have tasted and felt the fruit I am doing this, maybe to give them a second life, but I am very curious to see if the marks they leave behind are recognisable as those of the original fruits or if they will be very abstract in the eyes of a child. We leave a few fruit bits stuck on the clay slab, make a frame and then we poor some plaster into it.

While we wait for the plaster to dry Aretousa finishes eating and tasting most of the fruit, which starts to make me think this might be a step too advanced for her and the actual tasting and experiencing the fruit might have been enough. But I am wrong, as when the plaster is dried I am very surprised to find Aretousa completely taken by the fact that the fruits she had eaten and of which we have thrown the peels and uneatable parts away, suddenly reappear in the plaster mould. She can identify the apple and orange straight away and she runs her fingers through all the surfaces and textures. Then she does something I haven't thought of at all: she takes some of the stuffed Ikea fruits and matches them to the marks on the plaster. She puts the fabric kiwi in the hole that the real kiwi left in the plaster and she puts the fabric slice of watermelon on top of the watermelon relief.

The fruits which we were handling not long ago, now look like an ancient fossil or a prehistoric dig. I remember imagining as a kid when I was walking in the hot sand with my leather sandals and the dusty legs, how I could have been in ancient Greece and how similar it would have been for someone then, also dragging their sandalled, dusty feet and cutting ripe figs from a King Fig tree, just like I was doing. But that is not at all accurate and I would have been in a lot of trouble had I been cutting figs like that back then.

Apparently, we learnt at school, in early Classical Greece the police system was almost non-existent and as an alternative the government was relying on private individuals to bring breaches of the law to their attention, for a reward fee of course. But by the 5th century BC, many individuals started to abuse this system and brought to justice cases which were not genuine, just to collect the fee. Such people -false informers- are called in Greek Συκοφάντες, which literately means "fig revealers".  The word in English, Sycophant, has a different meaning, but in French it still carries the same meaning as in Greek. The story we were taught is that it was forbidden to steal figs from private gardens and also to export them, but as that was a common practice many individuals started to hide near fig trees waiting for a thief to appear and then inform the authorities of the theft. So they were called fig revealers. But many other explanations of the etymology of the word Sycophants exist and for a quick look see the link below.

http://linguistlist.org/issues/6/6-146.html