1000 Miles: Walking and Painting the Way of Saint James by Sharon Bamber

Standing at the ‘End of the Earth’, artist Sharon Bamber looked out across the Atlantic Ocean. Overwhelmed with conflicting emotion, she carefully laid down her 200^th painting and packed away her easel. She had done it.

From September 2018 to March 2019, I walked 1000 miles (1600km) from le Puy en Velay in France, over the Pyrenees, across Spain to Santiago de Compostela and onwards to Finisterre, the ‘End of the Earth’.

Every 5 miles (8km) along the entire route, I set up my easel and painted en plein air. Each painting took 3 hours. The whole journey took 6 months.

It has been said that when you hear the call of the Camino, you can’t refuse. I first became aware of this network of ancient pathways while visiting Limoges in France. I noticed bronze scallop shells set into the paths at regular intervals, leading through the city. Intrigued, I discovered that they marked the Way of Saint James.

Here was a route of enormous cultural significance, crying out to be painted. For me, it wasn’t about adventure, escaping, grieving, or any of those reasons for walking the Camino. This was, I believed, just about the Camino itself. An art project designed and undertaken specifically to document and honour the Way of Saint James.

It didn’t cross my mind that 1000 miles was actually quite a long way to walk, nor did I realise how affected I would be by the experience. The Camino had called to me and it was too important to ignore.

The journey took me on several well-known paths that make up the Way of St. James – the Via Podiensis, the Camino de Santiago (also known as the Camino Frances) and the Camino Fisterra. It led me up and over two mountain ranges, across high plateaus, through woodlands, along canals, through old stone villages and more. With each footfall and each painting, the hectic pace of contemporary life slowed down and the story of the land gradually unfolded.

I wasn’t alone.  Alongside me was my husband, Simon, pulling 40kg (88 lb) of equipment. Dupon, my beautiful donkey, carried the softer, lighter load of clothes, sleeping bags and tent.  A lovable 5-year-old, his donkey antics enlivened the journey in ways that I couldn’t have even begun to imagine.

This weight included only 25 painting boards at a time. 200 painting boards were impossibly heavy and bulky to carry.This meant that I had to box boards up into sets of 25 and drive the route before walking it, dropping the boxes of boards off at various points along the way. I then went back to the beginning and started to walk.

At the end of the walk, I drove back along the route to pick up each pack of 25 finished paintings that I stored in various places as I walked.

Before I started walking, I divided the entire route into 5-mile sections on the map. On the journey, I created one painting within each section. In this way, I captured the essence of landscape as I moved slowly through it.

As I walked, my choice of subject within each section was based on my emotional response, that catch of excitement, a heart-leap, that told me that I had to paint: historic towns, dry stone walls, coppiced woods, the path worn smooth or deeper than the surrounding land by years of footsteps. The raw ruggedness of the Aubrac plateau, twisting olive groves.

Each painting I named with its exact GPS location – a specific place at a specific moment in time. Every one of them with its own small story that adds to the cultural narrative of this route.

We walked from the tail end of summer to the beginning of spring, through all types of landscape and weather. The scattering of pilgrims that passed us at the beginning thinned, replaced by a smattering of farmers, hunters and hounds until they too disappeared. For much of the autumn and winter, we walked through a landscape empty of people. Only traces of their presence remained, archives of millions of journeys and lives etched into the landscape.