Welcome to The Grand Tour

Here's the sort-of beginning of this project.

The Grand Tour project started simply as a body of paintings based on a rather remarkable historic photo album. The photos are each a picture postcard, taken by a professional photographer traveling with the party in the photos. However, there's such a good back story to these images and photo album that The Grand Tour is now more about the storytelling. I'm not a writer, so apologies in advance for my inevitable run-on sentences, but I decided to start this blog as a way of sharing and recording the process of work - the research, conception, the painting - to the gallery show, and wherever it might go from there.

Let me explain.

My friend (and Gravers Lane Gallery Director) Bruce Hoffman, while a student in Rome in the eighties, found a completely intact photo album from 1933 in a Roman flea market . It has beautiful tooled leather, black paper pages with captions handwritten in white ink underneath every carefully placed photo. Each photo looks like a postcard, featuring this same, smiling middle-aged woman. Clearly, it's her album, her handwriting, her memories.

So beginning with a mystery woman, in a series of luxury hotels and Italian steamships, seeing the Agatha Christie-era Egypt, this story of finding the story begins. Welcome.

All the photos are captioned this way. Beautiful handwriting!

#vintagephoto #Egypt #vintagetravel #Rome #fleamarketfind #painting