[CHAPTER XV]
VERDOLAY—SKETCHING IN SPAIN
Sketching in Spain has inconveniences. In the summer the heat makes it imperative that the painter should be up with the dawn, for between eleven a.m. and four p.m. the heat and the brilliance of the light impose too great a strain on the eyes and the endurance. Under any circumstances we were almost forced to rise with the sun, for Milk and Vegetables both called before six.
Verdolay was an excellent spot at which to begin an acquaintance with Spanish scenery. There was a great variety of subject matter. The village itself was full of vividly coloured houses, and at the back was the wonderful old monastery of Santa Catalina. In the valley less than half a mile away were the huertas, or irrigated gardens, full of rich green. On the sides of the mountains were the olive terraces, which traced the architecture of the hills in a way to delight the painter's heart. Between the olives and the garden was the dusty cart road with its intermittent traffic, and the small dusty strung-out villages, the houses threaded on the road like beads on a necklace, especially that one called El Angel—though anything more arid and less angelic could hardly be imagined. In the hills themselves were fine ravines of strangely coloured ferruginous earths, orange, purple and blue; and the tops of the foothills were often crested with monasteries, like that of La Luz, which gave the scene a most romantic atmosphere. I clung more or less to the village, Jan wandered about the surrounding country or sat in the insufficient shadow of the olive trees near El Angel.
The first real inconvenience which we noted was that seldom did the best view possess a suitable piece of shade from which to paint it. Thus the artist's task was doubled; one had to find coincident scene and shadow. The apparently aimless wander of the artist looking for a subject usually excited the curiosity of the passers-by, so that either one was irritated by a series of remarks or became possessed of a small following of the curious. I use a square hole cut in a piece of cardboard in order to test the view and judge whether it would frame as satisfactorily as it promised to do. Whenever I placed this square to my eye one of my followers bobbed up his head and stared back at me through the hole, trying to fathom the mystery of my act. Once I had begun work I would become the centre of an excited conversation.
The first strokes of the brush aroused merriment. But often some onlooker astonished me by perceiving the object of my sketch long before the drawing was in any way clear. She (it was generally a she) would then be eager to exhibit her superior knowledge to the others. She would therefore dab her finger on to my painting to point out what she had perceived. This nuisance I fought by covering intrusive fingers with oil paint. By the time the overwise one had cleaned off the paint the drawing would be far advanced enough for the others to see for themselves what I was doing. As soon as I got well into the swing of work questions would begin.