Preface

If you have something to say on travels, you wonder about the words to use, and what to use first. Especially if you are only writing a short note like this one.
There is indeed a lively means of expression - the language of iridescent hues in the water-colour paintings, or of China-ink in the drawings brought back from every short or long journey. For travel, by offering excitement and causing a widening of experience, of profoundly human experience, is at the same time an important stimulant to creativity. In the first layer of many a work of art, there is perhaps only a journey, a transformation realized through "meditation and dreaming".
Yet travelling is both art and living. It gives the journey of our existence interest, charm, perhaps also difficulties and danger, while it makes it longer, as it also lengthens the voyage of return. And so I set sail.
Now plunging my brush into the humid air of La Loire, or into the morning dew of Brabant; now soaking the water-colour paper in the interminable drizzle of Alsatia; now moistening the blue evenings of Casablanca with water-colour and allowing the material itself to emphasize the austerity of Catalan earth or the snowed plains of Northern Europe. Thus, I completed the water-colours and the drawings that follow. But the journey continues.
It is hard, when you discover that, going past the Sirenes, there is no one who would tie you to a mast, so that you may not succumb to their charm. Or, at other times, when looking for a haven where to rest, you find that you are suddenly surrounded by Laestrigones. Yearning for a Nausika, you fall on a Kirke. But when you come across Kalypso, the storm ceases, everywhere there is calm, until a fair wind will blow your sails again for the return voyage to Ithaca.

Avyeris Kanatas