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| The Ponte Sisto across the Tiber, with the dome of San Pietro (St. Peter's) in the background.I stood with the book resting on the stone wall directly above the river, sheltered from the heavy traffic by the line of trees along the sidewalk. | |
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St. Peter's and the Vatican from the Pincio. A day of very flat light, and an awkward place to draw and paint. Again, there was the flat top of the pier of a stone wall that allowed me a place to stand, but there was also a rather annoyed vendor of coloured prints of Roman scenes--annoyed because passersby were distracted by me from examining his wares. This really could have benefited from some underpainting onto wet paper with a cadmium yellow mixture to get a richer tone. |
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The following day, the Colosseum and the Via Sacra from the Palatine Hill, the myriad brightly coloured ants dotting the pavement of the Forum below. Like the one above, it need an underpainting, but ... no time! Too many people. Time for a drink! |
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| The Grand Canal in Venice is so cluttered, the footpaths and bridges so crowded, it was impossible to wet the paper and paint properly. Therefore, I did a pencil sketch in the little book and painted it from memory back in the room. The abstraction of it actually helps, at least with my memory of it. | |
| We took the ferry out from Venice (the purple skyline in the distance) to the islands in the lagoon.There was a special tranquility there, so calm, the water so leaden and flat, the islands punctuated with campanili. Again, I drew the scene in pencil in the little book and painted it from scratch into the bigger one back at the apartment, where I could at least wet the paper and control the colours a little. This is Burano's leaning tower, looking like it will fall into the reeds in the shallows some day soon. | |
| The Isola di San Michele (the cemetery island) with Venice in the background. A wind kicked up and chopped the water into ultramarine and green slices. | |
| Venice, with Piazza San Marco in the middle, from the Lido. | |
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Some mornings in Cortona the clouds flooded into the valley on the north side of the town (the triste, gloomy side according to the locals, where Frances Mayes bought her "Under the Tuscan Sun" villa). The cemetery occupies a bank below the town wall, the land falling away steeply behind it into the valley. The far hillside, dark blue in the morning light, was visible above the cloud bank. Painted on wet paper over light pencil, begun with the book resting on the wall, finished later. |
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Santa Maria Nuova on the north side of Cortona. Painted from an annotated pencil sketch in the little book; as I was able to do it "at home" in the villa, I was able to wet the paper and underpaint, giving a much richer and stronger texture to the details applied later with relatively dry brush. These ones from Cortona have much better, more authentic light to them than the ones from Rome where I was more besieged by traffic and other tourists. |
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| The hillside below Cortona, from the side of the road a hundred metres from our rented villa. I didn't fill in all the terracing and olive trees that completely occupy the hillside (better to do that only mentally, I thought). | |
| The dining room at Cocciaio, our rented villa. I should have underpainted it completely, leaving only the patches of sunlight on the wall and floor "reserved" as white paper. That would have strengthened the colours. The scene is too light and bright for what was in reality a rather dark Cinquecento farmhouse interior. | |
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The view from the Cortona villa looking along the valley south to Lake Trasimeno. The straggle of buildings in the distance follow the railway line from Camucia to Chiusi. Again, underpainted with a cadmium yellow wash, then detailed with blues and a green made of viridian and burnt umber. The intensity of the blue shadow on the mountain on the left is just what I was hoping to capture. |
October 22, 2004, went back to Firenze and found a viewpoint above the river. A deluxe one, as I was actually able to sit on a concrete baluster and lean back against a lamp post! Firenze is a golden yellow town. Therefore, I had to wash the paper, at least everything that was the town except for the towers and the river, with yellow, and wash the distant hills with blue. The middle distance of the city needed an extra purple wash of mixed carmine and ultramarine. The essence of the scene is the huge forms of the Palazzo Vecchio and the Duomo above a sea of abstracted golden and sienna shapes. I could have poked more colour and detail into the middle ground buildings and roofs but am glad I didn't.
