San Giovanni Florence Italy

Cari Amici (Dear Friends),

The 24th of June was the festival of San Giovanni (St. John), Florence, Italy’s patron saint. I was street painting that day with my colleagues Johnny and Lalu. We chose to draw a copy of a painting by Pietro della Francesca, I believe. It depicts Jesus being baptized by Saint John. I show you a detail here of the work-in-progress.

Naturally, there was a parade through the center of Florence. I caught some of it on film in between drawing time. I love the expressiveness of this one man’s face as he points to one of the parade viewers.



On Day Two of our two-day pass to paint on the street, I arrived to discover that all three drawing spaces were occupied by Italian school children. Although I found them charming enough to photograph, I was not too amused professionally. For one, some of my colleague Johnny’s friends had come by around midnight the night before and invited us all to go to a nearby pub for a bit. Needless to say, I was not happy to have gotten up earlier than desired for no reason.

While our group paid for permits, apparently since 31 May, we have been paying the police. The teacher for this class, however, paid the Comune (Florence’s City Hall) and had more rights to draw than the madonnari did. The teacher assured me that they would be finished by noon. Since I was not prepared for this surprise, I did not have all of my street painting tools with me. So I asked if she would please wash my square again before she left (the drawing from the day before having been already removed).

The sun is normally straight above us until 2 pm, which helped to dry the street, but was not the condition that I wanted to start drawing in. So, I got a late start, but Johnny later joined me. I had chosen a Raphael painting, “Madonna of the Chair.” hoping to make a connection with a more recognizable (and for me fun to draw) image. Lalu was not working with us today, so Johnny took the left half and I the right.

This turned out to be a fun day and I got practice drawing babies. We did not have time to finish, but with all of the weird happenings of our day, we decided to just try to enjoy ourselves a bit. This last image was taken around midnight once we stopped working. In the foreground you can see some Persian language written by a very charming Iranian mother visiting Florence with her grown daughter and son. They wrote something to the tune of, “Kelly, this is a lovely painting.” Meeting them was one of the day’s highlights.

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