Marc Dalessio

Miss Gina. 14 x 11 in, oil on panel.

These are some of the sketches from my week in North Carolina. One of the more picturesque spots I’ve been to recently and some of the nicest people on the planet. I had great weather and was very fortunate to have an excellent guide of the area with the local talent, Jimmy Craig Womble. We also had two great plein air painters from Tennessee Kevin Menck (who has one of the more entertaining blogs out there) and Jason Saunders paint with us for the first few days.

Atlantic, NC. 8 x 12 in, oil on panel.

Beaufort Sunset. 8 x 12 in, oil on panel.

Elise 9. 6 x 8 in, oil on panel.

Red Neck Yacht Club (I'm not being derogatory, that's the name of the boat). 6 x 8 in, oil on panel.

We were talking one evening about great places to paint, and I mentioned that in Morocco the locals will bring you mint tea whenever they see you painting. At the above spot in Atlantic, the locals gave Kevin Menck a bushel of oysters when they saw him painting their boats.

Boat Lifts, Marshallberg. 6 x 8 in, oil on panel.

Shrimper, Radio Island. 11 x 14 in, oil on panel.

I was hosted wonderfully by Lee Dellinger and her husband Charles Jones and the paintings will be on exhibit (as soon as I can get frames sent over) in their galleries, Carteret Contemporary Art and Vision Gallery.

Joey's Boats. 8 x 12 in, oil on panel.

The World Traveler. 8 x 12 in, oil on panel.

The Two Galleries also have a blog with some action shots of the plein air group.

There is a reception this evening (Thursday, March 4) for my small solo exhibition at Ann Long Fine Art in Charleston, South Carolina. The show is called Il Giardino Italiano and it is based on a series of sketches I did for a commissioned piece last summer in Florence, as well as a few paintings from my September trip to lake Como. If you’re in the Charleston area stop by for a martini.

After the show, I’ll be in the U.S. for a month painting landscapes in North Carolina and California so my blogging schedule could be erratic.

I’ll be having another exhibition for charity next week at the Osteria di Santo Spirito. The paintings are all sketches from this winter painted in the Oltrarno of Florence and a portion of the proceeds will go to the Amici di Santo Spirito association. The opening reception will be on Thursday, February 25th from 6 to 9 pm. You can see some of the work here.

A Pokot Hut. 25 cm x 30 cm, oil on linen.

I have a couple of small pieces in a charity show in London called ‘Artists for Africa’. The exhibition opens on the 23rd of February at the Oakham Gallery in St. Jame’s (27 Bury Street, London SW1). For more information on the Friends of Africa charity, visit their website. The reception is on the 23rd from 6:30 to 8 pm (I won’t be making it though, too much work here at the moment).

Every year on my birthday I paint a self portrait. Many I’ve abandoned and destroyed, some years I skipped it, and I lost a hard disk a few years back with the only images of some of them. These are the ones that survived. It’s interesting for me to look back over the years to see the change in my understanding of drawing and painting.

My early attempts were pretty bad. The first two are from my three years at the University of California at Santa Cruz. The art department there wasn’t very didactic, and students were left to their own devices for the most part. All my technical knowledge at this stage was from books. Notice the poor compositions, the poor handling, the poor understanding of form…etc.

Self Portraits from my UCSC days. 1989-1992

The second two are from my first years at Charles H. Cecil studios. Notice in the painting the over-modelling of the hair as well as the poor design and annoying fuzziness in the clothes,

Early Cecilian Self Portraits. 1993-4

The portrait on the left was from 2002 (I think), and it starts to show a more mature style. Better design overall, better handling of the paint, and a more successful rendering of atmosphere. On the right is a sketch of Saint Mark’s Church in Venice as I was there on a plein air trip for my birthday one year.

Self Portrait from 2002(?) and Saint Marc's Church .

The next three portraits are recent and are more ambitious in scope, being 3/4 and full length with backgrounds. One thing about self portraits is that they can be a great way to experiment with new materials and techniques. The first one was one of the more complicated portraits I had ever set up, and the objects in the background were selected to describe aspects of my life. The second painting was painted on a much heavier weave of canvas than I am used to, and the last one was my first attempt at an outdoor portrait.

Self Portrait, 2005.

Self Portrait, 2007

Outdoor Self Portrait, 2008.

Here is a quick video (2 minutes) showing a time-lapse of this year’s self portrait. My experiment this year was to do the reverse of a grisaille, so I did the underpainting with a high chroma and glazed and scumbled the grays, greens, and browns over it. (The video is set to low-resolution, but you can watch it in 720p by changing the setting).

(Update: Here is the final image.)

Self Portrait, 2010.

Improvement in oil painting is not a linear progression in my opinion. The ability to see improves before technical skill, and we often have difficulty assessing honestly exactly how our work looks. Below is my attempt at graphing the progression.

(Being my first attempt at visually interpreting quantitative information, it probably looks similar to the self portraits at the top of the post.)

Even with the weak dollar, there are two things in Italy which are still cheaper than in America: A cappuccino and fine, hand-made frames. I thought I would post a plug for my framer here in Italy, Piero Franceschi, in honor of his new website.

Hand-carved Italian Frame from Piero Franceschi. Circa 1998.

I’ve used Piero for all my framing needs for about 15 years now. He makes some of the most beautiful frames around for a fraction of what I have paid in the U.S. or England, even when shipping is included in the price.

At the moment I’m very partial to the ‘Cassetta’ style frame. Its a 15th century Florentine frame design which still seems very modern (probably because the ubiquitous Californian plein air frames are based on this model).

Cassetta style frame on a six-foot landscape.

For shipping you can use Mailboxes Etc. here in Florence, their store is always full of crates of art heading over the Atlantic. Ask for Paolo (they speak English). For anything over Fed-Ex’s size limit I would recommend Fracassi for the costs. Both shippers know Piero and you don’t need export permits on just frames which saves a bit of money.

Whatever you do though, do not order frames from Italy in inches. They will not convert the measurements and you will receive tiny little frames back. Use google to convert the sizes (just type in x inches to cm) or, as I did, print out this customizable table.

View of Trevi from the Bed and Breakfast.

I’ve posted the dates and location for the first of two plein air workshops I hope to do this June. The area around the town of Trevi in Southern Umbria really amazed me for it’s picturesqueness when I was in Spoleto a few years back. I’ve been back a couple of times since then to scout the place out and I feel it has incredible potential for a plein air painting location.

The town is also quite beautiful and without much traffic, if the group is interested in cityscapes.

Picture taken in the center of Trevi this September.

For more information, head over to the courses page.

Emma. Portrait of the Artist's Dog. Oil on linen, 40 x 35 in, 2010.

For Valentines day (and our anniversary), my wife wanted a portrait of our dog, Emma. I’ve tried to paint her from life a couple of times but she tends to curl up into a little black ball and generally resists any attempt of mine to keep her looking even slightly picturesque. The other day I was photographing paintings in the studio though, and she hopped on a little stool next to me and struck different poses for about 5 minutes.

The dog was painted from the photo, and the background was painted from life. The sketches behind her are mostly from our neighborhood where she goes walking everyday.

Luckily my wife was pleased. In my experience, people are often much harsher critics of a likeness when it comes to portraits of dogs than of people.

I’ve been slacking on the blog, I know. But it’s because I have a few long posts I’m working on which require lots of research and learning on my part, and I’m crazy busy at the moment preparing for shows this year. In the meantime here are a few more plein air sketches from winter in Florence. These were painted with a set of M. Graham oil paints which I have been trying out:

Corsini Garden in the Snow. 12 x 8 in, oil on panel.

Piazza Demidoff in the Snow. 8 x 10 in, oil on panel.

Christmas Lights on via dei Servi. 10 x 8 in.

German Market in Piazza Santa Croce. 10 x 14 in, oil on panel.

Boboli Sketch. 12 x 8 in, oil on panel.

Our fake north-light window.

On the shortest day of the year, I thought it would be fitting to do a post about using artificial (or electric, artificial sounds so pejorative) light for painting.

For many years I would only work under natural light, but I was losing so much painting time in the winters that I needed to do something. As I was used to painting with a north facing window, the solution for me was to create a fake north-lit window.

We built a light box with 3 florescent tubes of different temperatures  (4500K, 5500K, and 6000K) and covered the studio side of the box with tracing paper to diffuse the light. At the moment though the light is too yellow, so I would like to switch out the 4500 and 5500K bulbs with 6500K ones. When the light is too yellow, it makes it harder to see yellows while you’re painting (and any color mixed with yellow, i.e. greens and oranges) so for the time being I try to avoid working on areas that require those colors under our light box. For more information on specific bulb brands check out Steve Kim’s great blog post on the subject.

Eventually I will also swap out the tracing paper for a Barrisol membrane to diffuse the light.

The box rolls on a track in front of our real window so we can move it over our natural light source in the evenings to keep working without any change in the shadow pattern. At the moment it is installed a bit too low, next time I have access to scaffolding we need to raise it a few feet.

Another trick I use to paint in the evenings is just to use the clip-on desk light attached to my easel so that my canvas, palette and reference sketches are lit with a blue daylight bulb, and then use a projector in the darkened studio to project a photograph to work from.

(Part one was a post on using natural light).