Iris Giannakopoulou’s card and exhibition invitation. A Greek urban sketcher!
Our last night on Mykonos was June 25. We had one more seafood dinner, then walked around the narrow streets until midnight, soaking up the atmosphere.
We walked by a gallery that had caught my eye earlier in the week. The large format canvasses I could see from the door had looked suspiciously like giant urban sketches blown up.
It was past midnight, but in Mykonos most shops in the tourist areas are open until 12:30 or 1:00 a.m. or even later. The clubs don’t even open until midnight or 1:00 a.m., then the clubbing goes on until sunrise.
So we walked into this municipal gallery and large canvasses of urban sketches blown up to 8 x 3 ft or 4 x 5 ft were hung there, lovely loose lines with light watercolour washes, quite a few vertical and horizontal panoramas. My travel companions all said “this artist is Sigi’s twin!”
The artist was there: Iris Giannakopoulou, a Greek architect from Athens showing her urban sketches of travelling on boats around the Greek islands and water ways. She had only discovered the Urban Sketchers organization about a year ago, and had never met another urban sketcher, so she was overjoyed to meet me. I could detect the same excitement in her that I feel about drawing. We showed each other our sketchbooks and talked for a long time. It was another one of those intense connections that can happen with other sketchers.
This is why I didn’t get to bed until 2:30 a.m. and we had to get up at 5:00 a.m. to catch an early flight to Athens, then transfer to Frankfurt, which made me a bit of a wreck on our travel day.
But what a great way to end my visit to Mykonos.
Below is a card I drew and a poem I wrote on my last visit to the beach. Not aspiring to poetic greatness, as you can see, but just trying to describe a wonderful experience.
