Marc Dalessio

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).

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.

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).

The Contemporary Florentine Realism exhibition received some criticism for the title. Some of the participating painters objected to the term ‘realism’ and on the Rational Painting forums the title sparked a thread questioning the need to use the word ‘contemporary’. Granted I did not spend a great deal of time thinking of the name. I just needed to come up with an all-inclusive title to describe what we do in the least offensive manner to all parties. Sometimes talking with other realists reminds me of what some wise man once said: ‘there is no greater cause for ferocious argument than a subtle difference between two abstract ideas’ (along those lines anyways, I can’t find the quote).

Most art movements were given their appellations long after the fact but in today’s soundbite-driven world, we should probably have a catchy name. Its interesting to think that some art movement names were originally insults, such as Baroque, Macchiaoli or Fauvism. Odd Nerdrum has been going for this approach by adopting ‘Kitsch’ to describe his painting, you can read his ideas on the subject on his website.

When I was studying, Classical Realism was the blanket denomination for traditional painting. It always seemed too ivory-tower to me, however, as many of my favorite artists are painting very modern subjects albeit with traditional methods and much of the plein air work I admire has nothing really ‘classical’ about it.

‘Slow Art Florence’ was an early choice for the show’s title, especially as the Slow Food movement it pilfers the name from is very popular here. Greg Hedberg has already used ‘Slow Painting’ for his show at the Oglethorpe University Museum in 2006 (Aristos had an interesting critique of the name here). Though it’s a good idea, a quick google search for ‘Slow Art’ turns up a lot of stuff that has nothing to do with this show, and I paint pretty fast anyways.

Two of the best ideas for a title were from the Rational Painting forums. The first was Graydon Parish’s ‘Post-Contemporary’ art, since the word has already been corrupted to mean a style and not a time. The other was Mark Diederichsen’s ‘Reconstructionism’, a play on Derrida’s Deconstructionism which has influenced so much of Postmodernism. Unfortunately, once again, a quick browse through google turns up exhibitions of Post-Contemporary art (which appear to just be more of the same), and Reconstructionism is already a hard-core Christian movement advocating a return to Mosaic law.

Back to the drawing board. If anyone has suggestions, post them in the comments please.

Update: For the time being I’m using ‘Post-contemporary’ for the show title on the door, I find it too amusing to pass on.

Gmail’s spam filter has become over-zealous of late and is sending lots of real emails to the trash (including family and gallerists who I would never mark as spam). I’m aware of the problem now and have been digging through the muck to find your unanswered emails.

Just so you know I’m not ignoring people and will get around to replying very soon.

Mia Madre by Elena Arcangeli.

Tomorrow is the vernissage for the first show I’ve ever ‘curated’ (I actually chose the artists, but not necessarily the pieces). There is a lot of excellent work on display from the teachers and alumni of the three traditional painting schools here: The Angel Academy of Art, Charles H. Cecil Studios, and the Florence Academy of Art.

The opening will be from 6 to 8pm at the Cami Gallery so if you’re in the neighborhood please stop by. The address is via della Condotta 36r:

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Here are some images from the show:

[View with PicLens]

Update: Here is a very short time-lapse film of the evening, you can use pause to see frames individually (sorry for the lazy photography, but I didn’t want to run around with a camera all night).

George Inness. Early Autumn, Montclair. 1891.

It’s that time of year again.  Days are shorter, the rain is back, and the trees have all gone garish reds and yellows.  I’m not a big fan of Autumn landscapes, but as I still have to paint outside, I  thought I’d try to find some inspirational paintings to help me along. Inness was probably the greatest painter of fall, and by the sheer amount of scenes he did this time of year, it would appear he really enjoyed it.

George Inness. Early Autumn, Montclair. 1888.

The problem I have with painting fall scenes is that is very easy to end up looking like a Sierra Club calendar (no offense to the Sierra Club) in the sense that the views can be too beautiful. A story I often tell my students is about the time I watched dolphins jumping in the Pacific at sunset,  a stunning thing to see, and very moving, but under no circumstances would I ever recommend anyone try to make a painting of dolphins jumping at sunset. Some things can be inspiring and beautiful without being remotely picturesque and it is part of the landscape painter’s job to decide which is which.

Here are a couple of Levitans as well:

Isaac Levitan. On the Volga. 1887-88.

Isaac Levitan. Golden Autumn, 1895.

If anyone has more good Autumn landscape paintings to recommend, I’d love to see them.