Finding a Practice on the Camino

Sharon Bamber and her donkey Dupon with painting equipment. Used with permission.

When the possibility of a Camino is more distant than the view of Santiago de Compostela cathedral spires from a pilgrim’s doorstep, virtual pilgrims scour the internet for inspiration.

I found Sharon Bamber on the American Pilgrims on Camino forum. Bamber and her husband and a 5-year-old French donkey named Dupon set out to walk 1000 miles from Le Puy-en-Velay, France, to Santiago de Compostela, Spain and eventually to Finesterre on the Atlantic Ocean. If the journey had mimicked Robert Louis Stevenson’s Travels with a Donkey in Cevennes, that might have been a story to tell. But Bamber carried paints and an easel with the intention of painting along the road to Santiago.

Her practice of painting outside directly from the landscape is called en plein air. In the tradition of the impressionists Claude Monet and Pierre-August Renoir, Bamber captured the light and the countryside as she encountered it every 5 miles across France and Spain. Each painting took 3 hours, and she completed two paintings most days, stopping in the morning and in the afternoon. The entire journey to Finesterre, which means the end of the world, took 6 months. Bamber’s resulting body of work is 200 paintings she’s included in a book called 1000 Miles: Walking & Painting the Way of Saint James.

Puente de Orbigo, by Sharon Bamber. Used with permission.

My favorite is called Puente de Orbigo, a painting of storks nesting on church towers in a village called Hospital de Órbigo in the province of León. Bamber’s paintings remind me of places and moments that are completely mine but that she brings back to me with the beauty and care and time of her own perspective.

Art practice has eluded me on two Caminos. Two years ago, I carried a custom watercolor set in my backpack, gifted to me for the purpose of painting each day on Camino. I intended to document the Camino in a way that didn’t involve pointing and shooting an iPhone camera or writing in a journal. I could never figure out what to do with the photos that I took, and words had become less and less adequate to describe the emotions and events of putting one foot in front of another on a long and empty road.

Instead, I pulled the paints out of my backpack one day under a bar umbrella, over a beer, while my Dutch friend looked on shaking her head. That was the first and last time I saw them. Far from the practice I imagined revisiting each day, the paints, brushes, watercolor pencils, and hand-torn and constructed watercolor paper booklets stayed in my backpack, an occasional reminder of the burden of an abandoned practice.

Practice is a noun, but it is also a verb, a fact easy for an American to forget because the noun and the verb are spelled the same. The British English spelling is “practice” as a noun and “practise” the verb.

Practice, or practise, is an act of repetition, rehearsal, or engaging in an activity again and again to improve or to master it. Bamber surely has talent, but painting two complete works of art each day, sometimes in the wind and rain of winter in Northern Spain, is also the result of relentless, joyful, unfettered practice.

The lesson of my abandoned practice was that a practice is only a practice when you practice. I took iPhone photos and posted to Instagram daily and followed other pilgrims’ travels on Instagram, but I was reluctant to call that a practice because it meant I had succumbed to the digital Camino that changed my experience so much from 2013 to 2018 when I walked the Camino Frances a second time.

Proficiency comes with returning to practice again and again, and I suppose that’s what I’ve sought over years of filling notebooks with 3 pages of handwritten words every morning. Practice brings proficiency, but it also brings the comfort of a daily ritual and joy at those times when practice becomes mastery. Those sublime moments might be the result of mastering technique, but they’re just as likely to be about existing completely in life’s balance and flow. 

To make a walking pilgrimage is to choose a practice of putting one foot in front of the other. If you walked the Camino, did you resolve to document your walk? Do you have a daily practice that brings you joy? What is it? Can you carry your practice in a backpack? I would love to hear about your practices and how you maintain them away from home.

You can find photos of all of Bamber’s Camino paintings on her website at www.sharonbamber.com, but I recommend purchasing the book for a story that is not complete without Bamber’s Camino vignettes and tales of Dupon’s roadside antics.