Shabs Beigh: My Art Travels
It’s an amazing feeling to be able to combine my passions — art, travel and family. The three together leave me with a never-ending reel of inspiration. I’ve travelled to many places, exploring both the land and the culture. They say that if you want to find the most beautiful destinations, follow an artist’s inspiration. The influence of the places I’ve travelled to can be seen in a lot of my paintings, especially the landscapes and seascapes. I plan to document my travels in the future, to help guide those searching for the same beauty that I’ve found.
I’ve visited many places in the UK, from the Isle of Skye in Scotland to the Lizard, Cornwall on the South Coast. We’re blessed in the UK to have such a vast range of forestry, seascapes and natural beauty.
Last year I ended up travelling to places in France that previously I’d only read about or seen on television. We did a road trip through three countries starting from Dover all the way to Venice. We travelled via Giverny, Paris, Geneva, Milan (and a quick detour to Lake Como which inspired a landscape painting) Venice, Florence, the Italian Riviera, and the French Riviera.
On the border of the two Riviera’s is Dolceacqua, a small town famous for its castle (Castello di Dolceacqua) and medieval stone bridge. We walked along this bridge, the very same bridge that inspired Monet to paint it in 1884 after spending a winter here.
My family caught a plane from Nice, France whilst I continued my art pilgrimage in search of the places that inspired the greatest artists.
Whilst in the South of France I visited the coast and was inspired to paint the Antibes seascape (perhaps the same inspiration that struck Picasso when he painted the Antibes coast.) I went to the Picasso Museum (The Musée Picasso, formerly the Château Grimaldi) which was built upon the foundations of the ancient Greek town of Antipolis. The collection of art there was amazing.
I also stopped at the Renoir Museum in Cagnes-sur-Mer, Cote d’Azur. Pierre Auguste Renoir bought the pale stone farmhouse house in 1907, after being inspired by the sparkling blue of the Mediterranean Sea. Like others, he had fallen in love with the clear colours and the quality of light of the south of France. There are 14 paintings by Renoir on the walls. A landscape sits in his son Claude’s room, placed beside the window with the same view that inspired Renoir to paint all those years ago.
I then drove on to the Rosary Chapel (La Chapelle du Rosaire) renovated by Henri Matisse. He began the project when he was 77, and spent more than four years working on the chapel, its architecture, stained glass windows, interior furnishings, murals, and the priests’ vestments. It was fascinating to see his work, and his use of just three colours: an intense yellow for the sun, an intense green for vegetation and cactus forms, and a vivid blue for the Mediterranean Sea, the Riviera sky and the Madonna.
On the way back to Paris, I stopped in Arles where Van Gogh used to live. I sat outside the yellow café that inspired him to paint Café Terrace at Night, in mid-September 1888. I also visited the asylum in Saint-Rémy de Provence where Van Gogh voluntarily confined himself, after cutting off part of his left ear.
On returning to Paris, I visited the Musée de l’Orangerie — an art gallery of impressionist and post-impressionist paintings from artists such as Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, Amedeo Modigliani, Pablo Picasso, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Henri Rousseau. The museum is most famous however as the permanent home to eight large Water Lilies murals by Claude Monet. I even got a chance to see some pieces from his private collection, and it was magical.
I then travelled to Giverny to visit the beautifully restored home of Claude Monet, the founder of French impressionistic painting. Whilst exploring his famous gardens, I realised that he never painted his pond in autumn. So, I did my own series in the same impressionist style as Monet. I made 5 paintings inspired by the same water lilies and pond that inspired him, and they have all been sold.
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