Day three at La Chapelle Saint-Antoine, Naxos
I woke this morning to the smell of oil paint drifting in from El-ham’s studio. There is something quietly wonderful about sharing a residency with a painter, that particular smell at the start of the day setting a certain tone for the work to come. The day itself was perfect after a stretch of overcast and unseasonably cold weather. Blue sky, sun, almost no wind. I sat out on the terrace with a long Greek breakfast before heading into the studio.
The morning was given over to further experiments with image transfer onto marble. The technique is beginning to click, and the results are starting to suggest where this thread of the work might go. Around midday Jean-Bernard collected me for a tour of the island. We began with a beautiful lunch of grilled octopus, calamari, tzatziki and a Greek salad, then wound our way inland through small villages, stopped at a Byzantine chapel not far from Filoti, and finally drove up to one of the marble quarries. The scale of the cutting walls is hard to convey, as is the sheer volume of offcut piled around the site. I selected a number of pieces to take back to the studio for further experiments.
Back at the bench in the late afternoon I finished a piece I had begun in the morning, submerging and rubbing back the paper layer to reveal the image embedded in the marble. The surprise was the colour. The original image is very warm, almost sepia in places, and it came across in cool greens. A genuinely lovely shift, and one I want to push further over the coming days. I am also keen to follow up with the quarry to understand how thinly a piece of Naxian marble can be cut. The stone is famously translucent when sliced fine, and the idea of a backlit work with the image transferred into stone that light can actually pass through feels like a real direction worth testing.
A productive day. The work is beginning to find its rhythm and the conversations with El-ham across the studios continue to add another dimension to the experience. More tomorrow.
Bronisław Kózka
