Mural Process Italy

Cari Amici (Dear Friends),

Here are two progress images on my mural in Caprese Michelangelo, Italy, the birthplace of the great Michelangelo Buanarrotti: one with shower cap, one without. Two days to go and I just enlarged the pool. Yes, this makes more work for me, but the artwork will be better.

Critter Watch Italy

Cari Amici (Dear Friends),

          My client wanted three buxomy babes in a pool setting with an Italian landscape and Roman ruins in the background. This evolved over time, as creative endeavors do. In late August or early September, I woke up with this idea that I did not want to create a voyeuristic situation as much as an inviting one. So, I decided to have the model try a pose that looked directly at the viewer and said, “Come on in; the water is fine.” Working in a visual language, sometimes it is difficult to communicate body language in text (e-mail). So, I shot a quick snapshot in my room while I struck the pose and sent it to the model to communicate what I wanted, time being of the essence by that point.

     I am struggling now with the acrylic paint. It seems so much more fun on landscapes, but seriously, for large areas and, thus far, skin, I am still wishing for my oils. Mostly it is the fact that acrylic dries fast (creating hard edges if I am not on top of it!) and that the color dries darker than applied. That latter makes it difficult for me to match areas that I have worked on earlier. Hmmm, practice and experience with this material could help that a bit.

     Today’s images are my “critter pics,” consisting of cinghiale (Italian for “boar”), a sunning lizard, and the swallows are back. Like the robins in central Texas, the swallows passing through here in Italia signify a season change. I wanted summer to last longer. I never got to swim enough and I like the warmth, as well as doing less laundry.

     Oh, yeah, and one image of my “Invitation” figure that greets one as he enters the room. This image just shows Notan design. I tend to build off of that and use it to check shapes before developing the figure.

Tuscan Mural Painting

Cari Amici (Dear Friends),

     I have been working day and late evenings on this mural, with little time to write. I have been changing things a little as the mural painting progresses here in Caprese Michelangelo (east Tuscany), Italy. I include a few images here, with others being posted on my professional page on Facebook. If you click “LIKE” I believe you will receive updates of images in your Facebook newsfeed. Here is that link:
Facebook: Kelly Borsheim, Sculptor Page

     Back to work for me. I have started the figures today! Oh, for art techies, I am using Zecchi’s and Maimeri brand of (Italian) acrylic paint. Sandro Zecchi has become a friend and he and his staff were very helpful in helping me get what I need for this project. Grazie a tutti!

Happy birthday to two special people in my life: Lei and Bethany! You are both so lovely and true.

Tuscan Trees in Mural

Cari Amici (Dear Friends),

I have got trees now in my mural project! And they are not all bad . . . it is a start, anyway: One foot in front of the other. Well, now that it is behind me, I can confess that on the 14th, I lost my confidence. I am not sure why then, but . . . yes, I am. For all the preparation work that I did with perspective and composition decisions, once I got the enlarged drawing on the wall, it either was not what I thought I had designed or it was simply wrong; it did not work.

It is amazing how similar and yet how very different mural painting is from street painting. When I was street painting, people often asked me if I could do a large painting on canvas. “Sure,” I said, “this is what I do.” But when I quoted a price, many were stunned. Why would it be “so high” and take “so long” when I see you in the street recreating the Mona Lisa large, in one day, working for tips? Well, I do not mean to get off on a rant here, but basically, I was making temporary art on the street and a copy of someone else’s design. And while I always try to do a good job, street painting is more a performance art than it is fine art. I do not mean that in a negative way, by any means. I mean that I have a relatively short deadline and my main goal is to make an impression with a very large image during that time. Impress you. That is the goal of a street painter. Spettacolo!

Yes, of course I want to impress people with all of the art that I make. However, when I have time to design something and make it last, it is a whole other ballgame. There are other ways in which to impress. Yet there I was, standing before my work and not happy. I had redrawn the first figure because she just looked too small. And eventually did the same with the distant figure. And then, two days ago, I realized that the middle figure would not work at any size because the viewpoint to the model was wrong. She is below me (as viewer) and thus, my reference from my model must reproduce that viewing position.

I used to exhibit a terrible temper. But I have worked on that over the years because I did not want to be that person. I now tend to turn my anger inside and I am not too kind when I am angry with myself. Was mine an error in calculations (which I should know better!) or was I simply experiencing my first mural project and learning that theories are one thing, reality quite another? Harumph! Lucky me. Having a better understanding now of myself, I know that this love-hate thing is often a part of each creation. (Whew!) This is because I am trying something new with each artwork, even if it may not look like that to you.

Frustration turns to anger; anger to depression and lost confidence. I know that in this case, I was also feeling overwhelmed by what I wanted to accomplish, with a few voices telling me that I would not be able to do this project by my deadline. First step: breathe. Second: Slow down and take time to think about what needs to be done and in what order. Do not run. Walk. It is a tortoise-and-hare thing and progress is progress. I needed to stop thinking about being “forced” to move fast (not my forte), and get back to thoughts of making something worth seeing, regardless of deadlines.

So, I contacted my model and arranged to redo the pose for the figure I needed. In mural painting, unlike street painting, I must create the background first. I also need to create the scene before adding the figures into that scene. However, their sizes and placements help me determine other compositional elements in the whole work. That is why muralist Victor Goikoetxea told me that one always fully designs the mural before any of actual artwork gets done. There is none of this, “Let’s see where the artwork takes me” kind of thing possible in most other creative endeavors.

Allora, two days ago was a frustrating, but necessary part of this project. Today, the work is stronger; the figures sized into place. Yesterday, I got what I needed from the model, the lovely Anna Rosa. I also painted the first layer of the background. And I painted trees! I have another day at least ahead of me on the landscape, but I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. And as they say, “Let us just hope it is not the train.”

If you have followed my career much, you will remember the name of master sculptor Vasily Fedorouk, who was my friend and mentor. Sadly and suddenly, we lost him just over three years ago. His wife Dilbara and I have remained good friends and now she is prepared to sell a selected few pieces of Vasily’s artwork. I will be announcing these pieces, with their prices, in my next art newsletter, which will come out later this month or early October, once I have finished my mural project. If you would like to be one of the first to receive this information, please sign up for my art newsletter. You may preview past newsletters on the following page, if you like: http://www.borsheimarts.com/newsletter.htm

Room With A View Italy

Cari Amici (Dear Friends),

Here are some shots of from my office window, morning then afternoon. How about that rainbow? This morning, my client upped the ante on my deadline. I must return to Firenze by the 24th of September and he and his wife will leave Italy not much longer after that. So, he plopped down a 1 TB external hard-drive this morning. He knew I needed another one because several weeks ago when I was here, I spoke to a friend of his at dinner about computer advice and more. The deal is that if I finish by the 23rd, I get to keep the hard drive as my reward. If I do not, then I keep the hard drive, but he takes the price out of my artist’s pay. Haha.

I used to think of geraniums as “old lady flowers.” But here in Tuscany, their brilliant reds against the stone and landscape have made me a tifosa (fan). I hope you enjoy those and the lovely skies. I just cannot seem to stop looking up!

Mural Project Italy

Cari Amici (Dear Friends),

I have the perfect client! He not only treats me as a professional, he gives me his dream requirements and then he also allows me to interject my artistic opinion and usually goes with it. He contacted me this spring and asked for a large painting. He had the idea fairly fleshed out in his mind, consisting of three voluptuous women, Roman ruins, mountains, and a pool in which the babes would frolic. But not knowing the lingo, he said “mural.” By the time I finished asking him questions to clarify his vision, he agreed that a mural on the entire wall was much better than what he thought he wanted.

He is also ideal because he can just look at a very rough sketch of my basic idea and see past the scribbly charcoal and into the vision. Over the summer I have fleshed out more of the details and spoken many times with my new mural guru, Victor Goikoetxea. After arriving at the site of my very first mural (as a grown up, I mean, since my mother let me paint an ocean theme on my bedroom wall when I was a young teenager), I recalculated a few details in the perspective and architecture part of the designo.

My client helped me on my second day here to draw all of the perspective lines in pencil on the wall. See how perfect he is? Even giving me an extra pair of hands! Actually, I think he is quite interested in the whole art-making process and has warned me that many neighbors and guests will be dropping in from time to time to watch me work. So, this is to be more like vertical street painting! Ha.

The second day I was delighted when I was told to come see the cinghiale in the yard and caught one on “film” here. The fig trees are starting to have ripe red fruit, and the beasts want to eat them more than they want their privacy in the woods. Who could blame them? I have myself been eating the juicy figs right off of the tree!

In this last image, I tried to show you how much I have drawn on the wall. I am not that good with Photoshop and thus just ended up making the contrast higher and then darkening the image. I hope you can see some pencil marks. There is a ventilation window in the upper left part of the wall. It was a bit of a problem and a HUGE consideration when I designed the mural. I was not sure if my idea would even work, but we took a look at the sketch on the wall and think that with some embellishments, all will be lovely. Here the dark wooden door with black iron hinges has been taken off and the base coat of white paint was painted over the red brick and wood piece that creates the opening. That way, I can paint right up to the window and the illusion will work better.

I am lacking sleep these days, not just these few days, but also because I explored San Sebastian, Spain, a lot, as well as spending long days at the mural workshop, trying to learn as much as I could in half the time of the other students, who stayed for the whole month class. I even spent one night working at the atelier in an attempt to get to a point in which I could continue with the next step of oil painting. Still, I have yet to learn that while I can do anything that I want, I cannot do EVERYTHING that I want!

Thank you for reading. I am not sure if I let you know often enough how grateful I am for your interest in the art and my journey.

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.