Cari Amici
(Dear Friends),
I
will write more about the wonderful stone carving symposium in Castelvecchio di
Pescia in northern Tuscany as I get my thousands of images organized. (Should we still call digital images ‘photographs’? hmmm, I have always had a problem with labels
and categories.) In the meantime, I am
spending part of my day away from the computer and getting back to my adored charcoal
drawings.
Before
I took off for my stone adventure, I went landscape
painting with a couple of friends around Florence. I have always been a bit intimated by
landscapes… Nature offers us so much information that she can sometimes shut me
down and I mentally wander off on some obscure path. However, in my recent attempts with pastel in
the gardens around Firenze, it became apparent to me that my first hurdle would
be to get enough DARKS into the composition.
Artists
often hear about how the light of day is bouncing around and shadows are just
not as dark as one might think. (Perhaps
this is more a conversation that emerged from painting from photographs since the
human eye sees nuance more than a machine can decipher.) But I need more dark. So, I put away my pastels for the time being
and decided to create tonal studies in charcoal. I am a bit biased towards monochrome images
anyway.
Isn’t
my friend pretty, sitting there enticing all of the zanzare
(mosquitos)? I should have painted her
in the grasses… In any event, this was during the time that I was not living in
a home of my own, with most of my belongings packed up in boxes waiting for my
new flat to become available. Alas, I
had no access to my tall easels. I have
a short torso and thus, once I sat down for the view I wanted, everything
changed. Haha.
I
decided that the light foreground grasses would become my subject instead of
the obvious Florentine scene along the famous Arno River. However, I first wanted to put in the darker
background objects. So, I sat up as
straight as I could, wiggled around to get the information I needed, … and did
I mention “going off on a tangent.”
??? I got totally absorbed in
drawing the land across the river! Next
thing I was aware of was the sun encroaching on our lovely patch of shade. I have always liked the idea of sunshine, but
not often the reality. Or at least my
being directly under her gaze.
So,
the grasses never got drawn. However, I
had a lovely nap. It is what summers are
for, right?
Happy
birthday, Aunt Sue!
