Streetpainting Florence Italy

Cari Amici (Dear Friends),

So, I last Friday I did my first stint this trip as a street painter on Via Calimala in Florence, Italy. On this day, I worked with one of the best street artists that I have ever met: Tomoteru Saito (who we all call simply “Tomo”). He is a gentle soul and you can see this in his lovely style of creating art.

This first image came from the camera of a Canadian artist who recently finished his art history studies here in Florence. His name is Antoine Mountain. We met the day before while I was crossing the (bridge) Ponte Santa Trinita. I saw a cute couple trying to take an image of themselves with famous Ponte Vecchio in the background and asked if I could take the photo for them. Then I heard a request from the man (Antoine) sitting on the bridge nearby, “Would you mind taking one of me, too, please?” Afterwards he decided to take a shot of me and I invited him to come over and check out the street painting the next day. He gave me permission to share this image of us that a tourist took while I was working.


Shortly after Antoine left, Tomo and I got rained out a little. Here is Tomo posing with our “good fortune.” I am not sure what the deal was, but with the rain came the cars and vans! This is strange to have happen around lunchtime. There is very restricted traffic in centro and I have yet to comprehend if the rain made the rules somehow obsolete. And yes, one of my money baskets became a taxi casualty.



One bright thing happened as the rain was slowing down: I met one of my blog readers! He happened to be in town and wondered if he would be able to find me street painting. So, this was quite fun and we got to have a decent conversation until the street became dry enough for me to return to work. Allora, Tomo and I finished well enough and we left just before midnight. Oh, and the original artist is William Adolphe Bouguereau.