THE GRAND EXHIBITION

Today was our penultimate day at sea, and this morning I ran my final classes entitled ‘The Art of Composition’, where I ran through the ‘Composition Checklist’ and had them painting a Mediterranean scene featuring textures and a few simple figures.

After a quick lunch, we returned to the Conference Room armed with the enormous pile of paintings that have been produced by the group over the last two and a half months… that’s a lot of paintings, I can tell you!

There were so many paintings that I started to think we might run out of wall space; everyone mucked-in, with two teams applying blu-tack or masking tape to the back of the paintings, and everyone else employed sticking them up on to the walls.

By 2pm, the corridor looked marvellous, and for two hours, everyone mingled and showed off their work proudly to their fellow passengers… even the Captain turned up for a gander.

At 4pm, the job of taking down the paintings began, and by 4:30pm, it was like we’d never been there at all.

In the immortal words of Mary Poppins and Bart Simpson… my work here is done.

Tomorrow is our final day at sea, as we draw closer to the UK. The weather has been slowly deteriorating, though, and the swell has noticeably increased. I think it’s going to be a bumpy night…