The Zambia Series

A few of these are still available.  Please contact me for information.

 

 

Ian Carrying Luggage

From our safari to Zambia, June 2014.

These paintings are mostly from my journal, which I did while we were there. Some of the very small ones I later did on larger paper, also in water color.

We traveled by train for 1500 kilometers from Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania to Zambia, and spent several days in a small village where our nephew works as a Peace Corps Volunteer. It was an uplifting experience.

It started with an hour long walk in the dark (see the painting “Heart of Lightness”). As we approached the village we heard shouts of joy, hugs and kisses soon following. Then they sang for an hour, choral harmony in which the whole  village joined.  We were perfect strangers yet they welcomed us as if we were long lost relatives.  We lived in a small hut and watched the people work on the dam, harvest cassava and do other chores. What loads the women can carry on their heads! We ate with them, partied with them. They are sweet and innocent, these people of Lunda land.

I hope you will enjoy my portrayal of the experience, the colors, the scenes, the sense of innocence.

Heart of Lightness We walked on the path towards the village under the glow of the yellow moon. After almost an hour we saw the glow of campfires on the hill. Soon we were welcomed with shrieks and smothered with hugs and kisses on the cheeks.

Heart of Lightness 2- we arrive to an amazing, loving reception complete with chorus! $250

The Chorus  After we arrived they sang in harmony for an hour.  Children in the front row would sometimes bang the rhythm on the ground. The second row was for the teens, and the adults were in the last.

The Chorus, Zambia SOLD

They sang beautifully.

Women Dance  At night the young women danced around a campfire, for which they used a brazier. The wood fire cast an orange glow. My original was just 2″x 4″. The rhythms were mesmerizing. Even some of the older women (by older I mean over 25, as the life span here is just 45) joined in. I wanted to also.

Women Dance in Zambian Village, our Peace Corps visit, A3, 11.5 x 16.5"
Women Dance in Zambian Village, our Peace Corps visit, A3, 11.5 x 16.5″ (sold)

Women Collect Sand  The Peace Corps project is a small dam for filling fish ponds.  They need the protein and the income.  They do not have much of either.  They have goats but they do not eat them, they are for dowries, and they are lactose intolerant so nary a piece of cheese in the country.   In this painting they collect sand for the dam.

Woman Collect Sand A4 sold

Walking the Bush  We explored the area around the village.  Here are friends walk through the bush.

What I experienced gave me a new perspective, different colors, the elongated limbs, the redness of the soil.

Walk the Bush (Sold)

Pula, Croatia, and its Fabulous Roman Amphitheatre

August 22, 2014

Our visit to Pula, Croatia

Croatia is just to our south, and we’d never been there.  It has a certain allure because it is Western European but somehow not, as it was part of Yugoslavia during the post war period.  It became more Slavic during that period and the traditional folk dance music you hear in the video (link below) reflects that origin.

Pula like Trieste is on the Adriatic.  Most noted for the Roman Amphitheater, it also has a temple and other bits from the Roman era.  It is an attractive town with 20 km of rocky beach the locals love.

To get there by land you cross Slovenia, so it’s 3 countries in two hours on the fast bus, but four hours through even more of the Croatian countryside on the way back.  Slovenia is in the EU but Croatia is not, so there’s no border check leaving Italy but in and out of the other two countries there is.  With my shiny new Italian passport we had no problems, although Peg was stamped in and the border guard suggested she get a ‘permesso di sojourno,” (residence permit) which as my wife and with an officially registered marriage certificate, should be no problem at all.

It’s a lovely town with architecture from the 13th, 19th and 20th century. There are pedestian zones, lots of cafes and eateries, summer sunshine and today a very pleasant temperature, in the low 20’s.  People walk about in shorts and lightweight shirts.  You hear what I assume is Croatian, lots of Italian and perhaps as much English; people who deal with tourists spoke it reasonably well.

It’s about a ten minute walk to the Amphitheater from the bus station.  The amphitheater is enormous, probably not as big as the Coliseo in Rome, but it is much more intact.  Only the seating area is largely gone, maybe a few hundred left out of the original 25,000.  It must have been spectacular when filled, and the fabric roof in place.

The main pedestrian zone is one of the more attractive ones we’ve seen but not all that different from others.   We had lunch in the area.  The service was very attentive, and the food quite good, for a bit less than Trieste, even, although we’d heard Croatia has become quite expensive.

It is still an active port and ship building continues.  There are large bays for ship repair as well as large yellow cranes for unloading and loading cargo vessels.

A Bit of History

Human remains (Homo erectus)  in the area date to 1.5 million years.  Pottery dates to 6000 BCE.  Inhabitation in Pula proper dates to the 10 century BCE.  Greek pottery and statuary remains attest to that people”s presence.

Starting around the 1st century BCE a Venetic or Illyrian tribe  lived here.  Under Julius Caesar the town became an important port, with a population  then of around 30,000.  However it sided with Cassius against Augustus, and the town was destroyed.  It was soon rebuilt and with it came the amphitheater (finished in 68 CE) which you will see in the slide show video.

The Venetians took over the city in the 1200’s and the Hapsburgs arrived in 1997.  After WWI the whole peninsula became part of Italy.  Mussolini persecuted the Slavic residents and many fled.  The Germans took over in WWII after Italy collapsed, and Pula was bombed heavily by the Allies after the u-boat installation.  Pula joined Yugoslavia in 1947.  Most of the Italians fled in 1946-47 in the run up.   To this day, Croatia is predominantly Roman Catholic.

 http://youtu.be/hEF_PE8XBTo?list=UUl7YKIwsWVvA_jQrQVcxYRg

 

See my art at http://garyartista.wix.com/gary-kirkpatrick-art

 

 

Giovanni Battista Tiepolo at the Civico Museo Sartorio

August 14, 2014

We visited the Civico Museo Sartorio this week.  It’s on the other side of Trieste but certainly walkable for us.  It is another mansion owned by a wealthy family that now holds the family’s collections, furniture with plenty of room for exhibits.  The mansion is huge, at least 4 stories and I bet there’s a hundred rooms.

The Sartorio family lived there from 1775 until Anna Segrè Sartorio donated the property to Trieste, requesting that it become a museum.   The Allies made it their headquarters after WW2 until around 1953.  The city renovated afterwards.  Stunning floors and ceilings, endless displays of ceramics, and portraits that went on and on.

The special exhibit displayed the drawings of Giovanni Batista Tiepolo, an amazing artist whose vast out of drawings and paintings make him one of the worlds best albeit less known.  .  He died in 1770.  Here’s one of his drawings.  Many of the ones we saw were done in ink.  They’ve been restored, having been found in bad condition.  The ink was acidic and had to be neutralized, and the backings removed and replaced.  This is quite an extensive collection.

https://i0.wp.com/art.findartinfo.com/images/artwork/2007/6/a001167991-001.jpg?resize=383%2C454

See my art at http://garyartista.wix.com/gary-kirkpatrick-art

BandOrkestra at Piazza Verdi, Trieste (video)

It’s a lovely venue for concerts, just 100 meters from the port in a magnificent square.  Several thousand were there, and hundreds more eating gelato in the nearby cafes.    The band was a way too loud in the beginning.  There’s a lot of brass and those first songs were heavy on them.  I tire of being hit over the head with noise.  The band’s leader paces constantly, which remained forever a distraction, but the musicians he assembled and leads are excellent.  Here’s a video of one of the numbers.

[slideshow_deploy id=’1897′]

 

 

http://youtu.be/hL_2GKH3Hoo

Video slide shows from a small village in Zambia- my favorite part of the journey

These photos are from our June 2014 visit to Zambia.  Our nephew is serving in the Peace Corps, following his brother in el Salvador and us in Panama.  The drawings in the video are from my journal, which I will publish.   This was my favorite part of the journey.  As spectacular as the animals were, as great as Victoria Falls was, this was more meaningful, touching me profoundly.

Here’s a people with so little in material goods who are just above subsistence and yet they expressed such joy at our arrival and for the next three days of our time there.

 

 

 

My art:  http://www.garyjkirkpatrick.com/

A bit or two about our neighborhood in Rome- Pigneto it is called

Here’s an article a good friend sent:  http://lonelygirltravels.com/2010/09/22/pigneto-the-rome-for-outsiders-and-me/

That article is better than these two in the NY Times:

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/22/travel/22choice.html?pagewanted=all

 

 

 

To Trieste, Part II

July 31, 2014

 

Somehow we ended up with seats in the first row, as they were still available when we checked in online just a day or two before the flight.  The seats were wide, comfortable, and there was plenty of legroom.  Alitalia and Ryan Air are a world apart.  In less than an hour we passed over Venice on the way to the northeast section of Italy on the Adriatic coastline Trieste is a port town and the bus drivers all learned from Mario Andretti, even the ones who take you to the planes on the tarmac.  The ones at the Trieste airport even leave early to get a head start, which in our case meant they left us standing just meters away.  Another Andretti came in half an hour.

The central bus station is on the water, but we went the other way looking for lunch.  We found a mom and pop place and shared ravioli stuffed with some sort of fish, with a tomato sauce.  I’d never had a fish ravioli before.  We shared a plate of mixed contorni, which are vegetables that come on the side of any meat or fish dish.  We got some of the local white from the spigot behind the bar.  Oh, and here in Italy, you can still buy wine in bulk.  BYO Bottle.  It’s good, it’s inexpensive, and it’s labeled in some detail.  The restaurant we ate in last night had about 6 huge vats, several filled with the local wine from the Colli Albani, best for white but good with reds too.

That lunch cost us about 20 euros, with a large carafe of the local.  Somehow it did not make me woozy and we made our way to the bus stop, up the hill to our street, well, past our street, and so we were asking the locals how to find our destination.  Two of two answers matched and we were at the door.  A kind and tiny woman came to get us.

It’s not a super old building but the elevator needs a key to operate so you have to come down to allow your guests to avoid the 5 long flights up the stairs.  It is the tiniest elevator you can find, and it’s screwed onto the outside of the building so you have a view as you ascend, not that I could turn to see it as our lovely greeter came in with us and our bags.  I survived the claustrophobic moment and gladly I was not connected to a blood pressure monitor.

Next-  our place for the next month.

 

See my art at http://garyartista.wix.com/gary-kirkpatrick-art

To Trieste, part 1

July 31, 2014

It was another early morning mad dash to the airport.  We got up at 5 a.m. and walked to Toscolana train station.  Google maps said we could do it, and taxi drivers wanted an arm and a leg to take us on a five minute ride at that hour.  We did what most Romans do, walk.  You can not carry much baggage on a scooter.

The route takes us along one of Rome’s ancient aqueducts.  There are houses tucked in between the arches, or the entry to their yards and gardens, anyway.  We were looking for a path but found a bar instead.  “Buon giorno.  Stazione  Tuscolana e per la?”  I asked.  He understood, I understood I hoped, and we continued along the aqueduct until we came across a ‘destra,’ a right hand turn.  Cars were moving along, a few anyway, and the direction seemed right, but after a bit I chatted with another friendly pedestrian, who said we were to take the right fork just ahead- now you know why I stopped to ask- and go ‘diretto’ –  straight on.  She did not say, “You can’t miss it,” which is always a bad sign.

Maybe 1o minutes on we came upon a large avenue; we were out of the boonies finally.  Traffic increased, another good omen, and in a few minutes we were on Tuscolana the avenue, and in sight of the station.  Now to find a ticket.

Peg went off while I hauled the baggage to the proper quay, returned a few minutes later.  No ticket.  No people.  The machine only takes credit cards that require a pin, and the cash portion was not working.  We’ll buy on the train.  You can do that.  The train arrived as scheduled for which we were thankful, for this is vacation time, and our landlords told us that this train sometimes just does not show up and to allow plenty of time; thus our super early walk.

As I said, this is Italy, although the same could be said for any country over here, so no one showed up to check our tickets, and the ride to Leonardo Da Vinci airport in Fiumicino was totally free, easy, and relaxing as well,  after the somewhat tense 20 minute hike in the dawn.

 

See my art at http://garyartista.wix.com/gary-kirkpatrick-art