The Hotel King David in Jerusalem, The Hotel Continentale and Mena House in Cairo, the Cataract Hotel in Aswan. All iconic, Golden Age of Travel landmarks. The photo album captions are filling in some of the details of the rough itinerary of this trip. It's becoming clear that this was a de-luxe way to travel, the steamships and hotels, top of the line.
According to the chronology of the album, which I'll just go ahead and presume to be in order of their stops, they began in Genoa. Genova, I should say. They traveled on the steamship S.S. Ausonia to Alexandria, and according to the captions, it looked as if the itinerary read something like this - Jerusalem, Heliopolis, The Vallery of Jericho, Cairo, Pyramids, Saqquara, Memphis, Helwan, Aswan, Luxor, Karnak, Thebes, Port Said. However, a deep dive might clarify exactly what the day to day looked like.
As I'm interested in this as a research project in and of itself, the purpose here though, is to create a series of paintings based on these photos. There are a few ways to go about how I might want to translate into a visual story. 1. Either I skip all the research, go into it blind and let my mind fill in all the blanks - could turn into an interesting interpretation. 2. Spend as much time as possible turning it into a research project first and foremost, then after seeing it through as far as it will go, start to translate it into paintings, armed with every detail. 3. Find out some basic information to put the trip in context, but leave most to the imagination.
Number 3 is clearly the way I'll be going. I'd like to keep up the research after finishing the paintings,
because I'm invested in this. I want to know more. I'm a history buff.
but for now, we scheduled the date for the exhibition, and I'm reverse engineering my work. I should say that I'm truncating the blog postings into a condensed period here because I simply didn't get it together to create this blog before now. I've had some time with this album, and it's starting to coalesce into some ideas about where the paintings will go.