St Ives is a seaside artist and surf community on the coast of Cornwall, England. When people talk about St. Ives, their eyes twinkle. Something about the light and the water’s color. It is September, the summer hordes are gone and I hear its siren song. After weeks in city concrete, I score a balcony apartment atop a hill with an expansive view of the town, its harbor, a lighthouse, and a distant blue horizon.

Colors at Play

Sloop Inn, Circa 1312

Dr Oz and Ska band

Harbor boats, low tide

Surfer’s Beach

View from the Train

Same town,
different shade

St Ives
from the Hill

Random palette

Street scene

The tourist information center is a steep downhill ten-minute (return twenty) walk to town. Narrow cobble stoned streets are jammin’ with couples, kids, baby carriages, dogs, buskers, and an occasional car that slowly squeezes by. There’s live music, boutique shops, galleries, and historic landmarks. Harbor boats float east of the peninsula, surfers ride to its west. The scene is as colorful as an artist’s palette; but this week, I choose to muse in my apartment on the hill…preferring to write, read, and just Be.

This rental is reserved by another in one day, but the St Ives September Festival — a two-week festival of art, music, and literature — begins in two days. How can I leave as a festival begins?

Hackney Colliery is described as being a “New Orleans brass band”. I buy tickets for that show as well as two literary lectures and two art classes (of which I have no aptitude and am hoping to gain some through osmosis). Hackney Colliery played with enthusiasm. Front and center-left, my “dance therapy” worked into a two hour perspiration fest. To support this independent band, I bought the only CD for sale of a live performance…I donated it to the apartment. Ain’t nothing like the real thing baby. Support Live Music.

VIDEO: Hackney Colliery Live

After an interesting literary lecture entitled, “Light and Dark”, author Amanda Jennings takes time to answer  questions. “You don’t need a creative writing degree. Write every day. Pick your “golden threads”, edit the rest.” Being amidst all this creativity and imagination is energizing. The next morning at the St Ives artist studio, Nicole Higgins hosts a pen and wash workshop. She leads fourteen of us to the seawall to sketch the prominent Godrevy lighthouse.

A friendly woman named Heather and I crowd next to each other on a long bench under an overhang. She lives in London but has a second home in St. Ives. The cold morning mist numbs us silly: her lighthouse looks like an albino banana and mine defies phallic description. We giggle like schoolgirls at ourselves.
After an hour, the instructor directs us back to the studio. Heather and I stop for a hot coffee to go and upon our return, take seats next to each other. The teacher says, “No, no, let’s put Heidi there,” and points to an empty chair between two other students at the opposite end of the table. Heather and I steal glances, mouths agape. As I collect my bag I whisper. “Oh my gods, Heather! We are being separated! Like we’re back in high school!” Admittedly, with focus, our final renditions in studio were better than our originals. Yes, teacher knows best. Thank you, Teacher.

“Should Travel Writers Go To Hell?” is another literary lecture that catches my attention. Former writer for the Lonely Planet guides, Des Hannigan addresses the unsettling work of travel writers explaining, “We explore and share information about a remote destination, only to watch its eventual exploitation forever altering a once pristine environment.”

Harping His Story

“Professional travel writers are becoming obsolete,” he adds. “It’s a digital age. Publications no longer need to pay a pittance to travel writers when the “average bear” tourist can type in reviews on their mobile phones.” Writers that spent weeks at a time investigating a locale, are being replaced by an online public with opinions — many uninformed or with sales and marketing interests. I’m not convinced. “Well, I still like to read travel guides, highlighting and making notes along the way. Digital-agers seem to be discovering the value in analog. Look at the resurgence in independent bookstores… and vinyl records! Readers have information at their fingertips, but don’t you think they still want to read stories and observations about human connections?” He agreed. “Yes, they do. Since the dawn of time, we’ve been drawn to storytelling.”

Surreptitious smear

Days following my pen and wash ignominy, I sense redemption in another workshop entitled, “Approaching Painting” with Ges Wilson. The description reads: “A guide through some of the materials and methods used by painters. Starting with drawing as a means of gathering visual information, we work through tonal studies into acrylic paint.” Perhaps THIS shall reveal my lifetime-in-hiding artistic prowess…We begin with basic pencil etchings at a surfers’ beach. A hilltop with an encompassing vista is saved for our practice with acrylic. Problem is, it is so windy up there that the paint is literally flying from our palettes onto the grass, our clothes, and each other. We students find this amusingly distracting while the teacher proceeds with an air of business as usual. Back at the studio, the black blobs in my painting bear no resemblance to a beach, ocean, rocks, or lighthouse. Ges directs us to hang our work with thumbtacks. While others are pinning theirs to the wall, I sneakily try to make improvements by quickly smearing my entire canvas with a thick white oil crayon thingy. The end result looks like the work of an eight-year old suffering from anger management issues. I may not have mastered acrylics, but I learned the marked difference between a number 2 and number 6 pencil. RAD.

Walking home at Midnight
No Guns, No Fear

Hallowed Ground

Chef seeking garnish

Mystic layers and
Godrevy Lighthouse

Stones in Balance

One of the reasons I came to St. Ives was to check out the Tate Museum. It is the only one of four Tates’ I hadn’t visited… still haven’t. There are amazing works of art showing in

galleries here, but to me, the magic of St. Ives is seen off canvas — in rays of light

upon forest ferns, in reflections off a turquoise sea, in a mystical distant fog. It’s heard in the in the cry of the gulls, in the silence between graves, in a busker’s melodious harp, and in soft spoken word… I feel illuminated.

Learning ignites a curiosity for more learning. I have to check out of this rental before the festival ends but another one begins this weekend in London. It’s called, “How the Light Gets In”…