Thursday 13 August 2009

PAINTINGS FROM ESTONIA summer 2009


Here are some of the paintings I did during summer 2009 while I was staying in Estonia

Above: from left to right, Sami from Finland and Triin on piano and Sissi 
eating water melon painted in the dining room of Uus Maailm Seltsimaja. 
Above: a water colour painting of my favourite church in old Tallinn, St Olav's, 

which has a viewing balcony where I sketched the next picture. 
Below: detail of the same picture showing the churches and castle towers of old Tallinn. The half obscured spire to the left is St Nicholas, the Russian authodox cathedral is in the centre and on the far right with the black spire is the Cathedral (Domkirk).




Above: an old dude on the train heading west from Tallinn. The whole 40 minute journey he was dipping into a packet of small skotch eggs and gobbled them down with his few teeth. Watercolour and pencil. 

A not very flattering portrait of Maria, my pregnant friend in Tallinn. 
She is actually a really soft and kind and amazingly imaginative lady. 

Triin's wonderful trumpet teacher offered to teach me tuba and also asked me to play 2nd clarinet in the brass band... the current 2nd clarinet has leprocy which triin says is starting to 'go to his head'! The first clarinet player is blind... its a hard act to follow!
                          BELOW: some of the musicians in the Tallinn Youth Orchestra

This is a picture of the trees outside Triin's family home in Mustamae in the late summer sunset.

   It has been a wonderfully busy and exciting time. The local community were all working together to prepare for their 3rd annual summer street festival. I hung a selection of paintings i did this summer in the sitting room of the community house and they printed my picture below on a full page of the local newspaper with a little text about me. 
I was very chuffed about that! 

It is a picture of the sitting room of the community house with Bots playing chess against the house champ and Triin playing guitar in the background. 


Mushrooms - a water colour still life from a selection of forest mushrooms we found, most of which we eat after they had been painted. 
I spent a lot of the day drawing people at the festival ... the poetry reading, the market in the staircase of seltsimaja, the busy cafe and this portrait of Argo and a girl called Paike (sunshine).

 Paike gave me a very nice back massage in exchange for her portrait. She was so good at it! 

Photo from the belly of the Suur Toll ice-breaker ship in the Tallinn navel museum.


Triin my beautiful girlfriend playing beautiful trumpet music for a soundtrack of a movie her friend Jan Tati made. 


Above and below: Satj, an English traveller and street musician hanging out in Tallinn.