5 years ago | Chamberlains Farm, Shevington Moor, UK | 12th January 2019

Five years ago, in an act of near-desperation, I came upon a Christmas gift idea that turned out to be better than anything else I could have chosen. A couple of weeks later, I’d framed them all and put the first batch on a wall. Almost literally, it’s become a gift that keeps on giving.

Years ago, some friends bought us a couple of prints for Christmas, I think. They were map-based characterisations of Edinburgh and Las Vegas. Cartoonish and lively, they offered a cheerful reminder of two places Helen and I visited together. We put them up in the upstairs hallway and, apart from walking past them countless times a day, didn’t think much more about them.

Fast forward to Christmas 2018. I’m looking to get something for Helen. We don’t really give each other gifts but it’s always nice to find something inexpensive and meaningful to ‘break’ our rule. Nice but, by definition, quite a difficult task. And by mid-December, so it was proving to be, once more.

I don’t know how I made the link between the two framed prints upstairs and a gift idea but somehow, I did. I looked up the artist online – a lady called Julia Gash – and found out she had quite the back catalogue of similar pictures, of places around the world.

Travel has always been important to us and it’s nice to be reminded of places you’ve been to and seen, even if it wasn’t for as long as you would have liked. The thing I most like about this series is its expandability. The nine locations I bought (Liverpool, Dublin, the Lake District, San Francisco, Melbourne, Sydney, Lake Garda, Amsterdam and Paris) haven’t exhausted our ‘tick-list’ of destinations and we’re obviously hoping to add a lot more. It’s good to know that Julia’s been hard at work doing versions of plenty of other places.

I appreciate art is subjective and this may not be for everyone but two things bear a mention at this point. Visually, this may be at the most ‘naive’ end of ‘naive art’ but Lowry was a ‘naive artist’ too, so we should perhaps be careful about being too sniffy about the ‘naiveté’ on show. Secondly, I’ve come to realise that it isn’t really about the artistic merit (however that may be defined) as much as it is about its power to evoke memories. In those many brief moments when you’re doing the mundanest of tasks, with your mind on three other things.

Whether I’m setting the table, plugging in the vacuum cleaner or running back to the en-suite for like the eighth time because I’ve left something in there and I’m now late; in those decidedly unreflective moments, my eyes scan past a Melbourne landmark or an Amsterdam gracht and, momentarily, I get a small hit of nostalgia and a hint of a promise that one day, I might go back and see it again.

If art exists to stir the soul, their micro-hits of positivity are a constant stream of soul-stirring. Good old Julia seems to be making a decent living of travelling the world and drawing what some may view as silly sketches of all the places she’s visited – to me, it’s possibly the best job you could have. Good luck to her, I say. And long may she continue to do it…