Return to Koroni Monastery

A rather small band of Thursday sketchers gathered together this morning for this week’s on location sketching. Today, we re-visited the grounds of the lovely Koroni Monastery – one of my all time favourite sketching locations.

We warmed up with a spot drawing with the non-dominant hand…..Fab portraits guys! (That’s me, by the way, second from the right….really must watch my posture!)

Then got stuck into the serious business of ‘proper drawing’…..

and very proper they are too – three beautiful watercolour sketches of the little chapel at the end of the garden.

As you can see, we had a new group member today – great work for your first ‘on loco’ session…

Here’s our base-camp towards the end of the morning – note the ever-diminishing shade….

I even managed to complete a sketch myself today – so few, and so competent were todays sketchers….although I’ve just noticed I’ve missed a window out! This is day 99 of my commitment to ‘a drawing a day‘. I may celebrate tomorrow with day 100!

The hi-light of the morning, for me, was being shown the artwork of the resident artist-Nun, which is displayed in one of the tiny chapels. Completely self-taught, she has been painting all her life and has produced a huge body of work in oils, acrylics and watercolour. She used to exhibit her work in Kalamata, before she joined the Koroni Monastery permanently, eight years ago. Most of her work remains in Kalamata, apart from the twenty or so pieces in the small chapel. She now mostly paints smaller items such as stones, plates, tiles and mini-canvases which are sold in the Monastery shop. She also showed us some beautifully drawn icons she had created using pyrography. It was a privalage to see her work, and enjoyable to do so in the company of fellow artists.