Watercoloring Under the Influence

Porta San Donato, Lucca

Old Enough to Be Bold

Between one obligation and another, not to mention unforeseen work distractions, I haven’t been outside working for a while. What oil painting I’ve been doing has been in the studio. As the weather has gotten lovely, and the distractions fade, I’ve been making up for lost time. Watercolor pencils have allowed me to get some of my own work done while on academic travel; they’ve also made watercoloring generally feel less precious. My first plein air oil was done in Rome a couple of weeks ago, and in the last two weeks I’ve drawn and watercolored around Lucca.

I’m sure that my oscillating between art and architecture has been of mutual benefit to each; the same for watercolor and oil painting. But since my introduction to watercolor, and working out of doors generally, was in the context of my architectural studies (under the remarkable Frank Montana), and I’ve developed a body of work rendering my architectural designs (both real and theoretical), I’ve tended to see plein air watercoloring as somehow related to the literalness that rendering demands. Now, as I feel less obliged to see watercolor as an extension of architecture, and my oil painting en plein air has been done in shorter blocks of time, I feel more at liberty to paint in watercolor; a felicitous experience on the Aventine a few years ago opened me up to a Sargent-like manner without imitating him. And maybe I don’t feel as much like each plein air has to be an exhibit-able (or saleable) work. Not to mention that a judicious use of gouache has taken some of the pressure off of not being able to add lights to dark areas of color. So yesterday’s watercolor outside the walls of Lucca was deliberately a more painterly exercise than it might have been several years ago. And while I have some regrets, it was generally more fun than watercolor often was in the past. All of this is part of the upsides of getting older.

NO TIME TO LOSE...

Early Autumn Evening in Lucca

I went out, getting a bit of a late start, to paint around the south edge of the walls of Lucca in early October. By the time I got to the subject, which I had seen brilliantly lit at this time of day over the last couple of days, I really had only about an hour until I would lose the sun. The sky was spectacular, the subject of the Baluardo (Bastion) di S. Regolo appealing for its dense clusters of varied trees, with three isolated trees below silhouetted against the walls. I started painting; then a rainbow arrived, and I though, “Come on! A rainbow?” I mean, how much more beautiful could it get—although painting a rainbow, unless you’re Rubens, can easily slip into kitsch. I reserved the ground for the rainbow, but started by tackling the fugitive sky. I managed to finish, more or less, in just an hour, on a roughly 25x45cm prepared paper with a light siena/ochre ground. I won’t say more, the pictures tell a better story. I’ll post the painting itself when it’s dry.

Camelia Show in Lucca

Botanical Painting at the Villa Bottini

As part of the annual celebration of the spectacular flowering of camellias in the region, the group Antiche Camelie della Lucchesia have curated a show of botanical painting at Lucca's graceful Villa Bottini, within the walls of the city:
http://www.comune.capannori.lu.it/node/16546
http://www.gonews.it/2016/02/01/mostra-antiche-camelie-della-lucchesia-inaugurate-a-villa-bottini-le-mostre-di-pittura-disegno-botanico-e-arte-contemporanea/
http://www.luccaindiretta.it/dalla-citta/item/63139-mostra-delle-camelie-anteprima-a-villa-bottini.html


I have three paintings in the show, juxtaposing trees and the city walls. It's worth a trip outside of town to the heart of the camellia festival in Pieve di Compito:
http://www.lanazione.it/lucca/mostra-camelie-1.1663894

August 2015 on the walls of Lucca, Baluardo di S. Maria

L’Occhio di Lucca

Or, Light in the City

On September 14 every year the city of Lucca celebrates its renowned relic, the Volto Santo, for the feast of the Exaltation of the Cross; the big event is in fact the night before, when the city is candlelit and a vast procession moves from San Frediano to the Cathedral of S. Martino. The day before the procession this year the city reenacted its ancient signaling system, an extension really of its circuit of walls to include a warning system broadcast back and forth from towers in the city and the surrounding countryside and mountains. Smoke from the Torre del Bargiglio in the Garfagnana was the “Eye of Lucca” warning of threats from the north; for the reenactment what was spectacular in town was the vermillion smoke emanating from the verdant crown of the Torre Guinigi. The purple clouds of the twilight sky and the brilliant red, despite its implications of danger, was a visual feast. For a city defined by its walls, built for defense but now enjoyed for a whole town’s passeggiata, the aesthetic delight the walls afford is rich and diverse enough—in different light, at different times of day and orientations—to reward returning again and again to paint en plein air.

The painting here of the Baluardo (bastion) di S. Maria in the late afternoon of late August was an exercise in capturing diverse greens and projected shadows. My notion of plein air—short window of time, accuracy of hues and values—can’t be divorced from the painterly technique needed for such quick work. This painting, aiming to be an hour’s effort, wound up at about 90 minutes, with the moon rising telling me it was getting to be time to go.

The Baluardo di S. Maria

just for fun, from Murabilia