Over the past few months this blog has featured three exceptional visual artists of the Camino. Well, here come some more. The Sacred Steps exhibition, which has already visited several university galleries around the United States as well as the Spanish Consulate in Montreal, is on its way to London, Ontario and Toronto. Sacred Steps brings together the artwork of eight American and Canadian Camino photographers and painters.
I'm a fan of the saturated colours and understated symbolism of my friend Wanda Sawicki's work, which was a highlight of the 2005 joint gathering of American and Canadian pilgrims in Toronto, but I'm also looking forward to seeing up-close the topsy-turvy townscapes and steeples of Father Jerome Tupa, the scenic watercolours of Katie Lopez, and - well - anything that evokes the Camino. (Click to see Wanda interviewed by London Free Press, January 18th.)
The exhibition appears at London's King's College, January 23rd to February 15th, with an opening address by Arthur Paul Boers, author of The Way is Made by Walking, then peregrinates off to Toronto's Saint James Cathedral for a February 19th to March 8th run.
January 1, crawling out of the smoking debris of 2008 - and into a bright shiny 2009! First resolution: blog more often. No, wait. First resolution: be a better person. Second resolution: blog more often.
Seems it's been a snowy snowy winter on the Camino. (A cold coming we had of it, just the worst time of the year for a journey, and such a journey: the ways deep and the weather sharp, the very dead of winter.) And the bedbugs are still biting (for updates, tune in to Yahoo Group Santiagobis or Pilgrimage to Santiago.com). Still, there's nowhere I'd rather be right now than slogging through a metre of snow up the slopes of O Cebreiro...No, wait. Where I'd most like to be right now (with slogging up O Cebreiro a distant second) is where I will be this time next month, in steaming hot Argentina. Don't know what kind of pilgrimages I'll find myself on there (gaucho? tango? the Che Guevara trail?) but promise to blog about it (see resolution #2).Let me peer a little deeper into the future. March and April 2009, I'll be doing several talks and readings around Toronto. If you've never come to one of my readings, I'll be expecting you. Dates and places to come. And then in May, I'm off to start work on my next book. Off to where exactly remains a secret even to the author. Feel free to contact me with bright ideas.Before then, however, I hope to have some news about what turned out to be my project for 2008, Discovered Madonnas, a three-act play full of magic, miracles, poetry, passion, twists, laughs, pilgrims and twisted ankles set (where else?) on the Camino de Santiago. Alert to theater folks with a love for the Camino: I've done the writing (or the first six drafts, at any rate). I need your help to get it on stage. No joking, I'm waiting to hear from you!
There are pilgrimages and there are pilgrimages. Some are vast, religion or state-supported affairs that draw tides of humanity. Others are quiet, personal voyages. The pilgrimage of Canadian sisters and authors Kristen den Hartog and Tracy Kasaboski is of the latter sort, a journey into letters, archives, and family memories in search of the lives of their grandparents' and their father's generations in the years leading up to and during the Nazi occupation of Holland.
Rich yet scrupulous in detail, The Occupied Garden recovers the life of an ordinary family living in extraordinary times, times when feeding a family was a struggle, and living by precepts of integrity and human decency required daily acts of heroism. Like any true pilgrimage, it is both a return to the familiar and a discovery of things new and strange, as the iconic figures of opa and oma (grandpa and grandma) become again what they once were: young lovers and, later, parents with huge decisions to make.
I had the pleasure of hearing Kristen speak about her book this fall at a fund-raiser organized by Toronto-area editor and writer Allyson Latta, who happened to be one of the early readers of All the Good Pilgrims. Allyson leads memoir-writing worshops, so it was fitting that all proceeds went to Alzheimer's research; the evening was devoted in every way to the preservation of memory.
For anyone looking to write about their Camino experience, a writers' workshop is not a bad place to start. To learn more about Allyson's, go to daysroadwriters.blogspot.com.
People ask me - often in solicitous tones - why I keep coming back to the Camino de Santiago, or more precisely, to the Camino Frances, the great pilgrim trunk-road that runs from the Spanish Pyrenees west across northern Spain to Santiago de Compostela. "You're in a rut," the questioners seem to imply. "It's a big world, there are other experiences to be had, other roads to walk. Why this one... again?"
What do I tell them? Follow this link to find out...
http://travelwithachallenge.com/Rhythms-of-the-Camino.html
Just a quick update to let everyone know that Peter Coffman's long-awaited website is finally up! Aaaaaaand it was worth waiting for. Peter, of course, is the talented fellow who walked to Santiago with his friend, the late, lamented Oliver Schroer, and provided the award-winning photography for Oliver's Camino album. At petercoffman.com, you'll find Peter's classy black-and-white Camino shots (disclaimer: I have a great big copy of "Route Napoleon," the cover photo of Camino, hanging in my living room), as well as a gallery of architectural beauties, ranging from Delphi to the Robarts Library. Feast your eyes!
Oops! Stop the presses. I just paid a visit to Oliver Schroer's site looking for the Camino cover photo and discovered a whole new gallery of photos by Angela Browne from Oliver Schroer's final concert, performed at Trinity-St. Paul's United Church, Toronto, June 8th -- including this one of Peter Coffman.
Speaking of talented photographers, I was pleasantly surprised last week to discover a Luisa Rubines website up and running.
I met Luisa on my 2003 Camino. In All the Good Pilgrims, I described her as "a tornado with ringlets, an angular, intense young Galician woman, always halfway to somewhere." At that time, she was taking pictures for an exhibition on the theme of the esoteric Camino; more specifically, on el juego de la oca, "the Goose Game," the popular European children's board game (ancestor of our Snakes and Ladders) with roots in the Renaissance, which many see as an allegory for the pilgrimage to Santiago. Fittingly, we first met up in Logrono, where each of us was conducting our own inquiry into the life-size Goose Game that is laid down in stone in the plaza of the church of Santiago. We kept bumping into each other (it might be more accurate to say, "Luisa kept whizzing by me") all the way to Castrojeriz, where I hung up my walking shoes for that year.
When I reached Santiago in October 2004, Luisa's exhibition - De oca a oca polo Camino de Santiago - was on at the Museum of Pilgrimages. The 63 photos, displayed back-lit in the darkened gallery, presented the Camino as a magical and mystical journey of personal transformation. In the penultimate photo, just before the pilgrim/goose is reborn as a swan, the pilgrim/photographer leaves behind the bonfire of her old self and wades naked into the ocean at Finisterre to be born again. Leavening the seriousness of the theme were the king-size dice and the spiralling labyrinth of el juego de la oca on the gallery floor, which extended a playful invitation to the viewer to join the game.The exhibition was a joy. I looked forward to following the trajectory of Luisa's career, even if from across an ocean. Yet when I started writing my book and went looking for her on the Web, I found that her old site was out of service. All the matches turned up by my Google searches turned into dead ends. (Ah, our wanderings in the labyrinth of the Internet!) From time to time, over the past three years, I have sent out Google search parties, but never with any results.
And then last week, I decided to give her one more Google and opa! There she was! With only 8 Camino photos, her website is not as generously illustrated as one would hope. But there is a capture of Luisa's complete juego de la oca gameboard, as well as samples of her other work - colourful images of Cuba, dire photos of the homeless children of Mexico's slums, and a black-and-white gallery entitled Galicia profunda - "deepest, darkest Galicia"...
I'll send this to Luisa. With luck she'll get back to me with some explanation of where she's been hiding - and what's coming up next.
Here's a project for a brave photographer: shooting pilgrims' feet. 
That's what Canadian visual artist Melinda Mollineaux did when she reached the end of the Camino this May. The results were on display recently at Ottawa's La Petite Mort gallery.
Mollineaux says:
"I photographed the soles of pilgrims' feet in the Plaza de Obradoiro as we arrived in Santiago, the final destination of the pilgrimage. These photos were very special to take; they were like prayers as I knelt in front of each person, with a kind of joy, waiting as the light reflected off their feet into my camera. I spent those few seconds in awe of the fullness of a life's journey in each person - beautiful, tired and radiant - in front of me. If only we would daily approach everyone we meet like that."
What makes Mollineaux's images of the Camino unlike any you have seen before is that they are pinhole images shot with used and discarded cameras 
(Pinhole cameras? takes me back to junior high physics class!) The colour images are painterly, the black-and-whites spectral, seeming to recall a lost time. I've taken the liberty of reproducing a couple of them here. There are lots more on Melinda's blog, Beauty is really good. Just look under the entry for September 8th and click on the "Small is Beautiful" slide show. There are some lovely "conventional" pictures of the Camino as well.
Over the past few months this blog has featured three exceptional visual artists of the Camino. Well, here come some more. The Sacred Steps exhibition, which has already visited several university galleries around the United States as well as the Spanish Consulate in Montreal, is on its way to London, Ontario and Toronto. Sacred Steps brings together the artwork of eight American and Canadian Camino photographers and painters.
