San Sebastian Spain

Cari Amici (Dear Friends),

Sometimes life feels like a “chicken and egg” thing. My friend Victor Goikoetxea who I met in Firenze, Italia, had only just told me about his mural painting workshop in his hometown of San Sebastian, Spain, when one of my collectors with a home in Italy told me that he had an idea for a mural he wanted me to paint. It has been a crazy, life-filled summer with a few unexpected twists.

With my schedule I found myself flying into Barcelona from Italy in time to catch the overnight bus across northern Spain. I arrived around 7 a.m. and was greeted by my kind host, one of Victor’s cousins. He drove us home and after being introduced to his family and dropping off my suitcase, his wife and kids walked me over to the mural workshop in the central part of the city. We began the first lesson shortly after 9:30 a.m.

While I have studied perspective before, I always need to “relearn it,” not using it to this degree so often. We spent the first 2-3 days calculating the proportions of a design that Victor had already come up with. The drawing of the bozzetto is the most important part of the work and most of us took a full week just for the drawings. We drew everything to a smaller scale than our real project and thus, one must always remember which number we are referring to. It spins my head around and I enjoy math!

Anyway, after working that whole day after a long sleep-deprived bus ride, I was surprised at my energy level. I met all the other artists taking the workshop and went out with a couple of women from Paris that evening. We had dinner on the beach and I took this snapshot of San Sebastian’s famous shore. Do you see the light in the clouds in the shape of a bird? I love watching skies!

The first thing that really struck me about this city is the architecture. It feels as if Alphonse Mucha and his Art Deco tribe settled here and made themselves comfortable. It is gorgeous here, with even door pulls having flowing beauty. Prettier than Bilbao. There… I wrote it.

By the third day, I was drawing an enlarged version of my bozzetto onto my canvas at three times the scale. We drew with pencil and will paint with acrylics and oil. Having already designed most of my first mural project in Italy, I was grateful that we were saving time on this workshop project because our instructor Victor had already done all of the creative design work for us. Sometimes I think that people just think we pop this stuff out of our heads. Well, sometimes we do (usually after many years of creating), but just like Albert Einstein, few become genius before having worked a lot in the field beforehand, learning, making mistakes, making progress, and repeating the whole process… a lot. I doubt very much that geniuses are born. Made, I believe in. Even then, most of us do not reach that lofty title, and remain simply students. It is a good thing that learning itself is rewarding.

P.S. No, I have not forgotten the anniversary that most people are thinking of today. I have no wish to make light of what happened by seeming uncaring about it. But I have always been confused on where the line is between remembering loved ones we have lost and letting losers remain famous for their “triumphs.” In my own personal grieving, I rarely remember the day a loved one dies, preferring to remember the life and the love, wherever and as often as it moves me.

Trip Highlights

Cari Amici (Dear Friends),

Ten days on the road. It was a whirlwind trip, fitting visits into short time frames with family and old friends that I had not seen in years. I also met many new friends. Here are some of the highlights since I last wrote:

1) This is an image of the oil painting I created for Amber and Alex Babcock’s wedding portrait. My sister Amber’s favorite artist is Alphonse Mucha, so I painted an 18” x 24” composition in a style similar to Mucha’s. They exhibited the portrait during their wedding reception this month. I hope that you enjoy it as much as they did.



2) In the midst of the wedding festivities, I was elated to receive an e-mail that my pastel painting ”Il Mimo - Firenze, Italia” became a finalist an the online competition for paintings. See all of the FineArtViews Painting Competition Winners (September 2009)

3) After Florida, I went to North Carolina and was totally charmed by my new friends in Raleigh. The Carolina Mixed Media Art Guild and long-time Internet friend and artist Jeanne Rhea invited me to speak about my life as a madonnari (Italian street painter) and do they all know how to make an artist feel welcome! I toured the gallery at Artspace, enjoying a variety of styles and media, and even recognizing one artist, Linda Ruth Dickinson, whose paintings I had first seen from my visit to a gallery in Houston, Texas, a couple of years ago. Here is an image taken with the audience that remained after my talk for a bit of mingling and munching. After my presentation, Penny (the tall woman in the center) gave me a lovely gift bag full of exotic chocolates. How yummy is that?




4) Jeanne and her husband Vince offered their home for the night, which was great. I want to share images of her studio with you. Seriously, this is THE most organized studio I have ever seen. No way that this was a “clean up for guests” kind of organized. I am still impressed. Jeanne said that she works with too many materials to NOT be organized. I must admit that I was a bit envious of her antique drawers. I have been hoping to find something like this for my Italian drawing papers. This would be much safer and cleaner than keeping the papers on the futon in my office!

Another image here depicts Jeanne while she showed me some test samples of her latest experiments with pigments. Visit her Web site or blog for updates - Jeanne is always exploring. The colors in her artworks are so much richer than anything you will see in photographs. Enjoy. Next time, I report on Florence, Italy . . .

October is National Arts and Humanities Month

Auchentaller Austrian Art Nouveau

Cari Amici (Dear Friends),

Through September 21 there is a special exhibit at the Leopold Museum in Vienna, Austria featuring a large body of work by Austrian artist Josef Maria Auchentaller. The exhibit is titled “Josef Maria Auchentaller – Jugendstil Pur!” (Pure Art Nouveau!) and displays about 300 works of art nouveau drawings, paintings, designs and jewelry, as well as photographs.

Auchentaller was part of the Vienna Secession (an artist revolt against the established art market), along with Gustav Klimt and others. This artist’s work is largely in the hands of his family and this exhibit features a lot of his works not previously shown to the public.

I am including a few images here that you might not find through the Internet. It was interesting to see this artist’s work after having seen Alphonse Mucha in Prague many years ago. Auchentaller’s works of the female figure and the jewelry designs are similar to Mr. Mucha’s, but there is definitely a distinctive voice at work. Still, I enjoyed the exploration of patterns that Art Nouveau brought to us.




This last image is a portrait in another area of the Leopold Museum that I just found irresistible. The translated title is “Man With Fur Cap (My Brother The Animal)” and was painted in 1923 by Albert Birkle. Enjoy . . .

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