This is my first contribution towards my blog about painting on the Mediterranean Island of Gozo. At the same time I have to start by narrating a little story of how over the last 3 years I was very fortunate to meet up with Lucy Willis (about whom I also wrote an article for the Malta Times newspaper). Before she visited first in 2011 (in search of her grand father's Gozo connections) I had just happened to look up her name in search of another of her lovely art books and found that she was coming to Malta and Gozo that same year to paint with a group through the Artist magazine. I then took the plunge and sent her an email asking if she would be willing to meet up just to get acquainted. Lucy without a second thought was more than happy to do so and so we arranged a meeting at The Grand Hotel in Gozo the day after her arrival. Before hand, through correspondence though, we had already discussed looking for the locations where her grand father H.M. Bateman had painted. She had told me that she was coming down earlier than the group with this idea in mind and with which I was more than happy to help out. I had in fact already identified a number of the paintings she had emailed me as the locations had not changed so much. So one early May morning(18th May '11) I crossed over to Gozo with the car ferry from Malta and drove up to the Grand Hotel in Ghajnsielem to meet with a very relaxed and bright eyed Lucy. After a quick coffee we were soon off trundling through the winding roads of Gozo with her handy reference book loaded with photocopies of her grand father's beautiful, meticulously painted works of Gozo in the 60's ie when H.M. Bateman lived there. As it turned out he had actually lived in a hotel which was previously standing instead of the Grand Hotel. I took several photographs of Lucy standing in the very same spot her grand father might have stood and also of the views to match them up with the paintings. It was all so very exciting and interesting to find the places and compare them too. Some where almost unchanged others overbuilt and painted but still there all the same. All of this we did before her art group arrived, but when they did I was also lucky enough to meet with them all as Lucy also brought her lovely group to my farmhouse in the hilltop village of Zebbug, on Gozo, where they painted, drank tea and had lunch and also watched Lucy give a wonderful demo of her painting the courtyard in the house. 'Dora's courtyard' in fact appeared on the Artist's Magazine last year. It was a lovely day I shall treasure for a long time. Again on Malta I met up with the group a few times - but my favourite experience was painting in the private garden's at the President's Palace in San Anton Gardens. The paintings of this I will post at a later date. - A little about me - I am a professional artist and art teacher and graphic designer (and I have also written quite a few articles on art and watercolours over the last 15 years.) While I worked as a graphic designer for the first 15 years of my art career I never let my art take a back seat and so have been actively working as a professional artist for most of my working career - this now spans over 30 years - However my art teaching career is perhaps a little more recent as I have been teaching for the last 15 years. I am the daughter of a well known Maltese watercolourist Albert Caruana who has influenced me greatly in my love of art and also my style in painting - there are times in fact when we confuse each other's work - this I hope to share with you later on as we do lots of plein air work together. We have also had a couple of joint exhibitions together which we both enjoyed immensely. Regarding exhibiting my work, I have quite a track record for participating in many collective exhibitions - the list is now over 50 exhibitions but I have also had a few solos and also joint exhibitions too. More recently though I have also started organising art workshops at my 300 year old farmhouse on the island of Gozo and would like to share my experiences here with you in the future contributions I make to this blog. You can find out more about me if you just Google my name - so I think I will stop here for the time being... I hope you enjoyed reading this and please feel free to comment or email me regarding coming to paint on Gozo or even to just say hi. [email protected] doralden.wix.com/painting-holiday