11 Jan Candace Rose Rardon: Lessons in Perception in Porto
Candace Rose Rardon is an American writer, photographer and artist who sketches as she travels. These sketches, combined with the stories behind them, poignantly portray those moments of encounter and illumination that become the stepping stones of adventure, inner and outer. We are extremely pleased to present her on-the-road sketches-and-stories here.
If you’d asked me why I’d come to Porto, Portugal, one brisk but sunny January weekend, I wouldn’t have had much of an answer.
At least not the kind of answer I had when I went to England and New Zealand (to work), to Germany and French Polynesia (to volunteer), or to India and Indonesia (to take part in an adventure called the Rickshaw Run). The only purpose behind my trip to Porto was a cheap flight from my then-base of London and a wanderlust-fueled desire to see another new city.
But there was something else, too: Tucked away in my carry-on, in between my journal and Sara Wheeler’s Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica, was something I’d never brought on a trip before — my sketchbook and a thin case of watercolor pencils. Although I hadn’t admitted it to anyone – not even to myself – I’d come to Porto to sketch.
At lunch my first day, as I sat along the Douro River in a glass-walled restaurant, my hand faltered over the page. How to portray the arched Dom Luís bridge that gracefully connects one side of Porto to the other? Or the barcos rabelos, the old wooden boats that used to transport barrels of the city’s famous port wine, but now ply the river with tourists? Or the narrow, colorful houses?
As time passed I slowly realized that sketching was less about precision and more about perception. This was my Porto, captured here for only myself to see, and that meant I was freed from having to render every wrought-iron balcony and tiled roof in perfect detail.
On my last night in the city, I finished Terra Incognita, and it was this passage from Wheeler that remained with me: “In Antarctica, I felt as if I was realigning my vision of the world through the long lens of a telescope. It emanated from a sense of harmony. The landscape was intact, complete and larger than my imagination could grasp.”
In Porto, too, my own vision of the world was being realigned – not through the lens of a telescope but through that of my sketchbook.
And for the first time all weekend, that felt like purpose enough for coming here.
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