David’s Odyssey completed
Now a good haunting is called for.
I am back in the UK after 10 weeks travelling.
I planned to mount my first solo painting exhibition at the home of Odysseus in the northern part of Ithaca. To do this, I needed to catch 4 ferries in May 2026 and travel circa 2000 miles.
The route was slightly circuitous because I went from Plymouth to Bilbao and then crossed from Barcelona to Italy, on to Ancona and thence to mainland Greece.
The exhibition featured local scenes and a little bit of artistic licence.
I left my Discovery car with Michalis at the Mentor hotel and am pleased to say it was still working when I returned by EasyJet on the 22nd September. More than that, it was clean and fuelled.
The exhibition was generally liked and set a sort of creative template. You have to say the owner of To kentro Café, Janetos, in Stavros also showed some mettle because it might be said the locals can be a bit techy about foreigners invading the place… even well-meaning foreigners.
The objective wasn’t to sell lots, but reassuringly/disconcertingly the owner said all would have been sold, but he was afraid the local tax authorities would nab him for not having a licence to sell art. Greece, it appears, has gone from black market to grey and now is white… whiter than white.
An English guy, ironically, had said he wanted the main exhibition piece, and a friend had said he wanted the ‘Heart of Ithaca’ painting. While not covering expenses, they were some vindication. But again, you can’t sell an exhibition and then let it fade away while it adorns somebody’s café. So realistically, it had a different purpose and had to stay up all summer intact.
I set back in early October from a rather sunny Ithaca and got off a stormy Brittany ferry on the 26th of October. The journey back was eventful, as much as the journey there. Incredible ruins, necromancy, English queens and lunatic motorbike riders in Barcelona as the heavens opened, and the lightning and thunder reminded one of Zeus, Poseidon and all the pantheon of gods and goddesses who had contributed greatly to the original Homeric Odyssey. We also had crew members bailing out and a sort of Circe moment where I had to escape the clutches of a siren.
By travelling on 8 ferries and not going the obvious route, I had embraced the call of the Homeric legend. Weirdly, I am not just saying this for dramatic purposes; I did feel at one point very nauseous on the Grimaldi ferry simply looking at the slop being served up. No seasick bands are made to counter horrible food served up by a prison warder.
So as I sit back with my dodgy leg feeling a bit better, I have already started the plan for next year’s bit of FUN on Ithaca.
Like anything that has a series feel to it, I thought the HEART OF ITHACA might as well now become two exhibitions on Ithaca next year. If this year was a challenge, let’s take it a step further…ramp it up and expect tourists to travel from one venue to another and vice versa. Crazy, lunatic, mad ambition verging on delusions of grandeur !!
This will be called HEART & SOUL.
You see, Ithaca is the small brother of Kefalonia, but somehow it has the bigger presence. But the north side of the island of Ithaca sometimes appears miles away from the south, even thought yoy can travel from one to the other in 25 minutes.
So if we move the Heart to the Mentor hotel owned by the redoutable Michalis, we can refresh the bar at Savros with a new SOUL exhibition. Of course, both places will need, say, 20 pictures, so it’s a challenge to create all this work and move some of the work from Janetos to the Mentor.
Anyhow, my two willing accomplices like the idea, so I have, in anticipation, created a smaller flyer which I have placed at both sites.
Also, we have kept some of the paintings at Janetos because, as I pointed out, even in the non-tourist season, he needs something on the walls.
Michalis has the big Adam and Eve picture, which I gather is already turning heads. Barbara, the lovely receptionist, even said that the figures were naked. What /
Adam and Eve naked…surely not !!
Anyhow, back in Blighty awaiting the witches to descend after the bloody boring budget. I am worse off and wondering if the blithering idiots understand anything about the economy.
David Jackson
29.10.2026
