More Graffiti Florence Italy

Cari Amici (Dear Friends),

Did you enjoy the last posting on the origins of Italian graffiti? I hope so because here I go again. These images are sadly of graffiti that is disappearing faster than others.

Zecchi’s Art Supply on Via dell Studio, not far from the famous Duomo (cathedral) in central Florence, Italy, still carries the pigments for the graffiti … it is a soft black and the white. Lovely. So, never forget to look up and look around. The world is a gorgeous place and people can do amazing things!

I may not be posting for a while: My favorite holiday is fast approaching. My free time is limited, but I love creating a new version of … whatever… for Halloween. I am quite excited to be surrounded by so many artists and creative people with tons of generous affection flowing. We have a fun party planned and trust me, there will be costumes! Life may not be perfect, but it is joyous.

Also, I have posted three albums of images taken from my summer trip to Spain for the mural workshop. They are here on Facebook. Just click on “Albums” and choose the Spainish albums of your choice. There are three from that trip. I believe you may see these even without a Facebook account. But, if you like, why not be friends with me there as well?

Thank you for reading and Happy Halloween! Boo!

Painting from Life

Cari Amici (Dear Friends),

I spend three hours every weekday morning painting from a live model named Magda. She is really lovely. I have three canvases going on: one seated pose on Mondays, one half-seated/half-standing pose on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, and then a standing view of her back on Thursdays and Fridays. The first two projects are being done on a white campitura (field colour) or in this case, a white-primed canvas with nothing added. The last project is on a toned canvas. There are different approaches one takes in a painting depending on these kinds of early choices and I wanted to learn what my preferences might be, and more importantly, why.

I first sketched in the gesture of her standing figure, using S and C curves to put in the romance of the piece. Later I tightened up my drawing by adding the straight lines to define specific angles (what I think of as the architecture). I want to give the figure enough architecture for solidity and strength of the figure, but keep enough romance in her so that she does not appear stiff and hopefully will elicit some emotion in the viewer.

For the sketch, I used raw umber and just enough white to cut the warmth of the thinned umber. I need to learn to use paint when I paint. That sounds stupid and logical, but I tend to use very little paint and this leads to a thinned, glazed color. Glazing usually makes a color look warmer than an opaquely painted paint. If I use more paint and get my tones, hue, and chroma correct, then even as the oil paint becomes transparent over time, my painting will look as I intended it to look, even after many years.

You may see some light patches in the campitura, especially down near the leg on the left, where the model carries her weight. This is because I must improve my drawing skills. I had the knee too low and used mineral spirits to remove the paint on my original sketch. It also removed the background color. You may also see that I chose to raise the front part of the knee by scribbling in dark background below the knee, lifting it in the process.

The background comes first since I must relate the skin colors to it. It is amazing how a line drawing that looks proportionally well done, looks very different in paint. Mine always seem to grow, in a similar fashion to how I experience “stone expansion” when carving. That is the phenomenon in which I remove plenty of marble in a day’s work, but the next morning the sculpture seems to have grown over night and I see how much more must come off. This work never gets dull! Really.

After the background, I start to add the lights in the flesh. I will do several layers of this, in a large part because of the transparency of oil paint. I want my lights to remain light, not darken over the years to become closer to the darker campitura underneath them. Timing is everything and I have tried to keep a pace on this project that allows the paint time to dry before I take on the next steps.

The last step you see here is my trying to create the forms of each part of the figure. I want to portray the volume of the rib cage and the hips, the head, and the arm and . . . you get the idea. I want them to have the proper amount of turning so that you can distinguish between a cylinder, an egg, and a more boxy mass. You may notice that even though I had designed the shadow shapes in my drawing, I painted over the spine in an effort to make the rib cage one united form. The big picture is always more important than details and everything is related.

Thank you for reading and following my artistic journey. Please do not forget to take a look at the recently available sculptures by my dear friend Vasily Fedorouk: http://www.borsheimarts.com/vasilyfedorouk.htm

Portrait Painting of Victor

Cari Amici (Dear Friends),

For two hours each Monday and Thursday evening, my artist friends and I take turns posing for portraits for each other. One model usually sits for four evenings, or eight hours posing time. This last round happened to feature my friend Victor Goikoetxea, who taught the mural workshop I attended in Spain in September.

Sadly, I missed Victor’s first sitting because I finished my mural in Caprese Michelangelo in the wee hours of a Monday morning and by the time I returned to Firenze, all I could do was sleep. Victor is quite a handsome fella, with a strong jawline and kind eyes. I often find portrait painting a bit bizarre. It is very difficult to catch a personality when the body is trying to remain still. Victor is vivacious and interested in many things with a very expressive face, but he did tell me that he spent his time posing thinking about and designing his next mural project.

So, here you may see my little portrait sketch in oil paint. I used raw umber and white, with a bit of black/grey in the hair. I had five and a half hours on this painting, having to leave early one night to meet a friend for a lecture we wanted to see. You can tell how scatterbrained I have been lately by the way I “prepared” this canvas. I grabbed a random piece of loose canvas in which I had done some figure outlines in acrylic a week or so before. Not having a drawing board at this studio, I simply taped the scrap onto another mounted canvas and started to paint. I wish that there were more hours in the day, but in truth, if there were, I would probably fill them up as I do now.

Graffiti Florence Italy

Cari Amici (Dear Friends),

One of the perks of living in Florence, Italy, is being surrounded by art. I was told the following type of art, the white on black frescos shown here, is what was originally referred to as graffiti. I cannot seem to get enough of this Italian street art and find it especially charming in its decay. Does that make me a downer of a personality?

I think it is also a good lesson in the use of color. In the same way that sculptors emphasize the part of the anatomy that carries the idea of the piece (such as the large hand on the throwing arm of Michelangelo’s “David”), using color for the most important concept pushes the eye back to the main point of interest. In this case, the colored part of the graffiti is the family shield for the dwellers of the home. Enjoy.

Also, the wife of my late friend and mentor Vasily Fedorouk has trusted me with a small number of his sculptures that she is finally allowing to come to the marketplace. I have posted images of the available works. If you are interested in purchasing any of these, please contact me. I can even arrange a payment plan, if you prefer.

Click on this text
to see Selected Works by
Master Sculptor
Vasily Fedorouk
[1950-2009]

P.S. For those of you familiar with Florence, Italy, this street art may be seen on Via Maggio, on the Ultrarno side of the river, not far from the Ponte Santa Trìnita.

Finished Mural Painting Italy

Cari Amici (Dear Friends),

So, on Friday afternoon I returned to Caprese Michelangelo, east of Arezzo, in the lovely Italia. I worked on as much of the acrylic painted mural as I could finish that evening, making corrections that could dry fast on the figures, creating light areas in anticipation of oils. That night around 2 a.m., I applied acrylic varnish on the entire mural. As Sandro Zecchi, of Zecchi’s Art Supply in Firenze, Italia recommended to me, I used a mixture of half glossy and half mat, mixed with a wee bit of water.

Saturday, I got an early start on the oil painting part, namely the figures. My friend and mural teacher, Victor Goikoetxea, came over and took a quick look at the Michelangelo Museum on the top of the mountain. Then he joined us for dinner at La Buca di Michelangelo before heading off to his own space in the Tuscan countryside.

I ended up working after dinner until 4:30 a.m. Saturday night. And Sunday, I started up again around 9 a.m. and this night I never went to bed. Because of the scheduling of my ride to Arezzo to catch the train, I had to be finished with the mural and packed up, ready to go by 7 a.m. Those who know me well know that I love the mornings, but not after the nights. And the night always gets first dibs on my attention.

However, I got my second wind about 5 a.m. after taking a break to wander out in the moonlight to pick and eat some grapes an hour before that. I finished almost everything, except the flowers on the two potted plants, some minor details in the figures, and also, I had intended to put a nude man into the hole behind the real wooden window. Equal rights, you know, but also as a gift for the woman of the house. But that will have to wait until spring since my friends are leaving Italia soon.

Here are the images I took around 6 a.m. today. One is the view from the door on the left as you enter the room; the other from above the center of the Jacuzzi. I hope you like my mural. It is approximately 200 x 400 cm. I, for one, am pleased with my first mural (as an adult), but exhausted.

Please feel free to leave a comment on my blog entries, if you feel so inspired. Thank you for sharing my artistic journey with me!

Pool in Perspective Figure Painting Mural

Cari Amici (Dear Friends),

There were many changes that happened during the process of actually painting my mural. Today I will talk about expanding the pool in the mural design. Having decided on the size of the woman wading in the pool, I just felt that the perspective was either not working or the pool just seemed too small.

Even though acrylic paint dries rather quickly, there are still degrees. It is a bit of a finicky material. So, a lot of how I have gotten done this much this quickly is because I paint on one area and then leave it to go work on an entirely different area. I suppose my experience as a production supervisor in an imaging and duplication lab many years ago helped hone my skills for organization. Once I understand how something works, I plan accordingly to make all the steps possible weave together to meet a deadline. That means that I do not follow the usual sequence of events, knowing that if I can start one section drying before choosing to work on another, I can return to the first area with fewer problems and keep the flow going. I hope that makes some sense.

The first image shows how easy it is to lengthen the pool. One-point perspective gets easier once a few key point / lines have been determined. So, I simply extended the lines reaching to the vanishing point. And then I painted a solid, opaque color on the edging of the pool. This is to help me see the new pool size and how it relates to the figure. It also insures that I do not get confused on which area was travertine tile and which was pool border.

I include this second image so that you may see what a narrow space I am working in. The Jacuzzi is not even a meter away from the wall.

This last image shows the preparation I am making to allow for transparent water in the pool. You may see the round step “under the water.” The light source or sun is coming from the right. (I chose this side because there is a wide vista window on the wall that is adjacent to my mural. It seemed natural to have the light coming from the direction that real light enters the room. The step gets the most light since it is higher than the pool floor and a horizontal surface that gets more light than most of the vertical planes. I want this area totally dry and set before adding water around the figure.

You may see in this last image that I am doing the same process with the large tree on the right. I have painted the branches that may show in the final painting and I wanted the paint to have LOTS of time to dry. Later I will add foliage and allow that to dry. Lastly, I will paint the flowers. So, in a sense, I am working the whole painting “at once,” as I do one of my fine art paintings.

Figure Painting Mural

Cari Amici (Dear Friends),

Hmmm, I have been struggling too much with painting figures with acrylic paint. It dries darker and slightly redder and FAST. So, I tried the idea of painting the shadows in one color and the lights in another. Then I work the transition between tones. In a smaller area such as the transition, I hoped to be able to work fast and keep soft edges.

Still, it has been a struggle for me and I have not been happy with the result. I had been working on this mural from a day that started around 8 a.m. through the entire day, usually going to sleep around 2 a.m. I was slowing down mentally at a time in which I needed to be the sharpest.

Today, I saw my friend Victor, the muralist, and he told me that he only does a tonal value of human figures in acrylic. Then he switches to oil! Sheesh! I left Caprese this past Sunday morning and returned to Firenze. However, I am going back this weekend to fix what I do not like, as well as create what there was not time to finish.

Here are a few more work-in-process shots, including one of some visitors to my “temporary studio.”

Thanks for reading! My book about my street painting in Italy is now available in Amazon.it in Italy, as well as other European Amazons. Check it out on Amazon.it. They even allow you to see some of the inside pages!
You may also order a signed copy directly from me (no extra charge for the inscription) and I will get you a shipping quote from Italy. Contact me directly, please.