Pam Mills came by today to help select paintings to include in our upcoming exhibit. I'd set out all the paintings I thought might be pertinent along the walls. She paced around, moving this one to over there, and that one to over here. It took about half an hour. By the end, all but fifteen of them were in the "not for this show" stack, and the remaining ones were in small groups. 

There was something about how Pam chose the groupings that brought out what each painting was about. It seemed as though she was fixing on relatively unimportant details - on color, or on continuing the swoop of a line from one painting through to the next. This was enough to invite the mind to trust that there was meaning in the juxtaposition.

"It's not about whether it's a good painting," she told me. "It's about whether it forms a meaningful whole." Like the difference between a sentence and an essay.

By upgrading to Mac OS Lion, I now can't access my copies of Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop. This is a disaster for me, since I mess around A LOT with digital images and then paint from them. I hope to solve this without having to give up access to iCloud...

On the other hand, this is a white person's problem. I have enough to eat, my house is full of stuff, and I can still do other kinds of art.

Many of my paintings are 24 x 18", partly because they're easy to store at that size (they fit into apple boxes). I love doing large canvases, too, the kind where you can't figure out where to hang them when you're done. Small ones? Meh.

This must change, my colleague says. If we are to do an art show together,  we need smaller, more affordable paintings. Typically, paintings are priced by the square inch (mine are $1.50/square inch), so the smaller, the less expensive.

I have a lot of high-end wood scraps lying around from various house projects. Since returning from Scotland, I've been sanding and priming them. 

To my surprise, when working with irregular sizes, I seem to get more whimsical. These paintings have been quick and fun to make. I'm hooked!

Today Holly and Martin are fine but Camilla has a sore throat. We'd planned to spend our final day in a final flurry of sightseeing but lazed around all day instead, venturing out only to eat tzatziki and fish soup.

At the airport we ate sheep cheese and sesame bread, and then flew back through the night to the north.

Today Holly woke up sick but Martin is now healthy. We took our laundry to a storefront where they also sell army uniforms. You give your clothing to the lady and write out a ticket telling her what settings she should use on the machine and she tells you to return in six hours.

We went to the Hospitaller's castle. It is in ruins, but still very beautiful, for its situation and for the sense of hope and time. The walls are heavy stone, with fig trees, lobelia, and thistle growing from the cracks. A display of broken columns from elsewhere was spread out, but we just wandered around in the brilliant sunlight, noting lizards, wildflowers, and views.

For lunch, we went to a random restaurant that turned out to be fantastic. It probably has to do with the food being fresh and local, with plenty of olive oil, garlic and care. 

Then we walked. 

And dinner? Cuttlefish in its own ink and more strawberries.

We went to the same Fish Taverna for lunch and had another feast, this time with cuttlefish in its own ink and strawberries drowned in cream.

Martin and Holly went off on rented bicycles, and Alice and Camilla and I walked. We found a temple to Dionysus, built around 300 BC, and made an offering of a mallow flower and a fig. The conversation, of course, turned to orgies and drunkeness. I said I was too old for such things (if I ever wanted them at all), but would like good sex and a sip of wine now and again. We wondered if, the more repressed a culture was, the more extreme its outlets become. Ancient Greece, in which the women were shut up at home all the time, had the Maenads. Modern Japan, in which all social interactions are ritualized, has the lolicon that we found so shocking when we visited. Finally, we realized that we would have to leave Dionysus in order to have a more seemly conversation, so we did.

One of the Greek Orthodox churches was open, so we went in and admired the many icons and wall paintings. Outside, olive trees, feral cats, and oranges, with the sweet sound of doves.

That morning, a gypsy woman and her daughter had come through begging, and in the afternoon, we found their temporary home, under one of the rubber trees that the Italians had planted after the devastating earthquake in 1933. The tree is at the base of a fortress built by the Hospitallers in the 1400's overlooking the harbor. We sat at an outdoor café sipping cloyingly horrible iced teas, chatting and looking at fishing boats.

Up the stairs from the harbor is a mosque dating from Ottoman Empire days, and the very tree that Hippocrates taught under. It was part of the Egyptian tradition mentioned by Imhotep, where, after a ritual, you sleep under the tree and report your dream to the physicians, who then know how you are to be healed.

Woke early. Martin had been sick in the night, and was still tottering about as we bustled around him. We clattered off to the train, then the bus, then the airport check-in in Bologna. 

RyanAir is a cheap people mover, cramming us into a teeny plane cheek by jowl and then selling bottles of water for 3 Euros en route. When we landed, there was the sound of trumpets.

Greece is luscious. We'd forgotten about vegetation! Italians are not all that impressed with stuff like trees and lawns, preferring cement and formality. But in Greece, the pastures were knee-deep, there were orchards everywhere, and it suddenly felt like home again. Geraniums, wisteria, olives, oranges, jacarandas, palms – all the plants of my childhood! I hadn't even known that I missed them until my heart leaped in joy at the Greek countryside. That sense of deep home alone paid for the trip.

Kos is a  tourist town, with lots of whitewashed buildings, bikini shops, bars, leather and jewelry shops, and the residents sprinkled in between. 

Our landlady told us that the best years of her life were spent in the USA, when she was ten through twenty, but then she met her stupid husband. When her son was born, she packed her stupid husband's suitcase and threw it out the door. The time for pushing women around is over, she told him. You talk and I listen, but then you have to listen to me, too. She paused. Her stupid husband is changing, she said, but slowly. He lives in Athens, which is a crazy place to live, lots of crime and unrest. Kos is better but the USA is the best.

We went to a fish restaurant where we were positively pampered by the proprietor. April 1 is the first day of the season, and we were his first foreign customers, he said. He recommended assorted fish plates, and so we had lightly breaded fried sardines (good except for the very strongly flavored head), chopped grilled octopus in olive oil, calamari in garlic sauce with fried potatoes, and boild nettles with lemon, salt, and olive oil. For dessert he gave us halva, which here is semolina cooked with sugar, cinnamon, and olive oil into a mouse-shaped cake.

We lingered to talk about personas. You have many parts of your brain which contribute to conflicting voices and impulses. When you shape a persona you are choosing which voice to give active expression to, and hence, slowly but concretely, shaping your character.

Someone suggested that a persona is a lie, but I think that it is a lie only in that you can't express everything simultaneously. You are not obligated to do a data dump every time somebody hangs out with you - in the narrowest sense, you are merely an artifact in other people's lives and they are not equipped to handle more than one fully realized brain at a time anyway. To make the social compact work you have to manage how you come across to people, which necessarily means you edit. In more intimate relationships you have time to reveal more, but there is not enough time in the world to ever reveal everything, not even to yourself. We are layered and infinitely varied.

We went to the sculpture display in front of the Duomo. Lots of lions, and a pedestal with four Venuses with multiple breasts (we should all be so lucky).

Several statues of Hercules doing violent things. 

What I am drawn to is the whimsical creatures that were used just to fill up space - the goats, gryphons, and grotesques.

The River Arno was scenic and the overlook crowded. Many artists had stands with art ranging from crap to very nice. I was tempted by a botanical drawing of a fuchsia. Ponte Vecchio (Old Bridge) where we were headed, has dozens of rooms bulging out from the walls of the bridge. It was crammed with jewelry stores and one beggar.

Along the streets are pushcarts filled with tourist items such as handbags or pashminas. They have a single axle and around midnight, they're pulled through the streets by muscled vendors. They open out to have walls, an awning, a table, and drawers under the table.

We spent the afternoon in the gardens of the Pitti Palace. Gravel paths wind under olive arbors, and the more open vistas are crunchy with statuary. You can see the hills of Tuscany over the red tile roofs of the city.

We saw green lizards in the knot garden and sat on a forbidden flower-dotted lawn to draw.

In the evening we wandered about, seeing Middle Eastern grocery stores, smooching teenagers, a plaza with a palace. The plaza hosted an encampment of gypsies, with long skirts or vest and white shirt and large mustache, who were sleeping in bedrolls propped against the wall. Florence at night is just as awake as Venice, but the people seemed younger, from high school through young adult. Lots of motorcycles, lots of walking around in the middle of the street and moving aside only when the cars got very close.

Breakfast at the Fish Market, long walk through the city, visit (but not by me) to the Peggy Guggenheim Museum. In the gift shop were large purses made out of sea sponges! Camilla, Alice and I waited for Martin and Holly in a café where we worked on our sketchbooks and got more and more sleepy. Finally, it was slightly later than what we'd planned on.

We rushed back to the hotel where they'd allowed us to leave our luggage, and rushed to the ferry, and rushed to the train station. We sat there in sudden calm, watching people wash around us like a laundromat.

The train was very civilized, with seats grouped in fours around teeny tables. Outside, the farmland was just starting to sprout, probably wheat. Trees with white flowers and one that might have had green flowers. Farm buildings like cubes of cement.

Florence is lovely, lots of tall buildings and something that we now recognize as Italian.

We had a reservation at a youth hostel, five flights up a stairway with threatening notes pinned up at various places it indicating that the hostel's patrons might be a very very rowdy bunch.

A burly African dude greeted us and led us to a room marked "private," which was crowded with silent people texting, and mysterious stacks of things like mattresses, suitcases, bedding, bookshelves, and stuffed plastic bags. "Please wait," he said. We waited. Occasionally, people would bustle in, move a mattress or take a towel out of a bag, and leave again. Out the open window you could see down a narrow chute to a filthy alley. 

The dude came back after about twenty minutes. Very nervously, with much hemming and hawing, he said, "I must inform you ... the website said ... it was quite clear. Quite clear."

We stared at him, sensing impending doom but, in our exhaustion and foreignness taking a sudden dislike to him, the mysterious goings-on in the room, and the silent zombies texting all around us. He might have bad news for us but he was getting no help from us. He couldn't do it. He shifted stance and said, "I must talk to my manager," and left again. We waited.

He came back. "The website was quite clear."

We stared at him.

Finally, he blurted out his news. "There is an age restriction. Eighteen to 35. Because it gets noisy. We are going to have a party, it's Friday night, surely you can understand that."

We could not. We thought about the five flights of stairs, and of our luggage, and the fact that we wanted dinner and wanted it at once, if not sooner.

After some bickering, he allowed Martin to use the "staff only, this means you!" computer to find another lodging.

We walked back in the direction of the train station and up four flights of stairs and into a narrow hallway painted green with arabesques over the doorways. A computer screen displayed something in Arabic script. Martin spoke French to the lady, who led us across the hall, through a doorway and down another hall to a family room with five beds, a kitchenette, and the only fully functional bathroom we had or would encounter in our travels. Out the balcony we could see the Duomo and red tiled roofs. All right then!

We had a luxurious, endless dinner with truffle ravioli (the best meal I had on this trip, and possibly ever), gnocci, and a divine lemon sorbet. As we ate and chatted the conversation waxed hilarious (no wine in sight, though) and a couple of Indian dudes were drawn like flies to honey, offering us, on seven separate occasions (we counted) a bouquet of roses or possible one or two of them, or one or two for each lady, or possibly some other combination, why not?

The Duomo (where we met one of the rose sellers again) is a fantastic confection of a building, enormous in its impact. White, green and pink marble in smooth or ornately carved sections, and the famous brick dome, a marvel of contemporary engineering, that rises over a wooden interior dome.