Marc Dalessio

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.

My mobile blogging set-up.

A few artists have asked about the technical side of doing a blog so I thought I’d do a quick post. This blog is running off the free Wordpress software and its all hosted on Bluehost, which I have been happy with. Bluehost has all the tools you need and is pretty easy to get running, and its cheap. It won’t handle getting on the front page of reddit, but you can sign up at MediaTemple for twice the price if that’s a possibility. The theme for the blog is Simplex, and the gallery plug-in is NextGen Gallery which, to be honest, is less than stellar, but its the best gallery of the ones I’ve tried.

For the hardware, I try to only buy gadgets and computer gear that have a large community of online users as I find active forums better than relying on the manufacturer’s support. The camera I’m currently using is a Panasonic GH1 as I want to start adding more video to the site, the active forum I follow for it is DVXUser. For blogging while I move around, I have a small Dell mini 9 which is souped up and hackintoshed thanks to the guys over at the MyDellMini forums. The cellphone is a Nokia N82. Its a good phone with real GPS and a decent 5MP camera (and it geotags the photos), it also doubles as a mobile wi-fi spot using JoikuSpot which is the most useful data-tethering program I’ve found. (It takes your 3G data connection and broadcasts it as wi-fi, much easier than fussing with cables and drivers. It works with all smart phones, except the iphone of course -ha ha suckers). My home computer is home made and built around a Gigabyte EP45-UD3R motherboard which I love, 8GB of ram, 2.8 ghz core 2 duo (Wolfdale), 2 TB of storage in Raid 5 and dual boots windows7 and osX.

Piazza Tasso in February

My plein air painting of Piazza Tasso in February won first place in the oil painting category of Utrecht Art supplies 60th Anniversary Art Competition. I never really enter painting contests so this is pretty cool for me.

The painting itself was the largest plein air cityscape I had done at the time. To get the view I wanted I also had to stand in the road on a rather busy street which made things difficult. As the subject was a commission I first tried to get the Piazza with sunlight on it but, like painting flower gardens, to get the colors to come out it was actually better on overcast days. To paint the empty parking lot meant working on Sunday mornings every other week because of the street cleaning.

The great failure for me in the painting is the white car, which everyone recognizes immediately as a Fiat Panda, but it was a Fiat Uno and I botched the shape.

I’ve been very impressed with Wordpress for the last six months but I’ve been trying to figure out how to get the blog to fit into my existing website. A couple of days ago I realized I should just merge the whole website into the blog.

The fact is that Wordpress has developed a very powerful platform for presenting information and, while I don’t have the free time to learn to code for it, the free plug-ins and add-ons make it much easier to update other aspects of my site (besides just the blog).

Quite a few artist friends have asked recently about setting up a website and I would advise people to look into a blog format.

Next winter when I have more free time, I’ll try to get around to learning how to code a custom theme. In the meantime, be sure to update your bookmark to the new address.

'What the Thunder Said' by Ramiro. Oil on linen, 31.5 x 75 in, 2004.

Lets talk about some other people for a change. These are other websites I have bookmarked. To be honest I don’t spend a great deal of time trawling the web for art, so most of these are people I’ve heard of through word of mouth or know personally. My list is heavily weighted in favor of blogs as I’ve been looking for other good painter-blogs for inspiration.

• Painting Perceptions. I just discovered this blog today. It discusses a lot of the ideas that I think about while painting.
• Angel Ramiro Sanchez. My neighbor’s fancy new website (also the author of the painting above).
• Grand Central Academy Blog.
• Natural Pigments Blog.
• Jeremy Lipking’s Blog. Angelino painter’s blog, I’ve seen a couple of his shows at the Arcadia Gallery.
• William E. Elston. Painter’s website with a few blogs.
• Lines and Colors. Eclectic blog on art.
• Miles Mathis. Painter’s website with essays.
• Colin Page. Painter’s blog.
• Marc R. Hanson. Painter’s blog.
• Frank Gardner. Painter’s blog.
• Julian Merrow-Smith. Painter’s blog.
• Nathan Fowkes. Painter and illustrator’s blog.
• Darren Rousar. Painter’s website and blog.
• Joseph McGurl. Landscape painter’s website. I’ve seen a couple of his shows in the U.S.
• Mike Bayne. Suburbscapes from Canada.
• Scott Christensen. Painter’s website (I hate flash-based websites).
• Skip Whitcomb. Painter’s website.
• Daniel Graves. Painter’s website.
• Clyde Aspevig. Painter’s website. I subscribe to his mailing list too.
• Richard Maury. His page on the Forum gallery website.
• The Florence Academy of Art. Where I teach.

And here are my favorite non-art-related blogs:

• Gizmodo. I love gadgets.
• Lifehacker. My other job is fixing computers. I get a lot of ideas here.
• Nokia n82 Blog. My current gadget of choice.
• Reddit. Whats new online.

Feel free to add any links worth looking at in the comments.

Daniel Lord Road. Oil on canvas, 20 x 30 cm, 2007.

When I first began painting outdoors I remember walking for hours trying to find something that inspired me. Now I see beauty everywhere. Being inspired is like any other skill and repeated practice makes it easier. If you spend thousands of hours trying to find subjects which move you emotionally, eventually you get really good at it. Having a personal vision of what you want to paint also helps a great deal, but the best artists are always pushing themselves to tackle new subjects and this is where being very sensitive comes into play. I believe this sensitivity can be trained to the point where an artist can feel inspiration almost on demand.

House in Myanmar. Oil on board, 20 x 30 cm, 2009.

For years I have traveled to exotic locations in the winters to paint outdoors. Going somewhere where the colors, light, and shapes are completely different from what you’re used to makes it very easy to be inspired right away, but one sees so much more after a month in a place. Six weeks, I think, is the ideal time for a painting trip as you have the last two very productive weeks where you really have a feel for the subjects.

Ironically, my best trips are the ones where I have arrived and thought ‘My God, did I come all this way for this?’ because I couldn’t see anything worth painting.  Having to squeeze paintings out of an visually uninspiring area is often more conducive to beautiful art than going to somewhere like Rajasthan where you see extraordinary things everywhere. I become almost frozen in a place where everywhere you look at is picturesque from the fear that at the end of the trip I’ll have missed the stunningly perfect view I should have painted.

Where I live, Chianti, is actually surprisingly unpicturesque for all its fame. Olive trees and vineyards make for very poor compositional elements when seen from a distance and all the great landscape painters have avoided the area, preferring the landscape of the Sienese to the south, the Mugello to the north, or Maremma to the west. Even the local plein air school, the Macchiaoli, produced surprisingly few paintings in Chianti, and the paintings they did do tended to be very small with simple, close-up subjects. For me, living in a pictorially uninspiring place is a bit like the marathon runners who practice at high altitudes to run faster at sea level: when I then travel to somewhere with great obvious compositions everywhere I am all the more inspired. When I want to paint larger, more classical compositions with a strong foreground, middle-ground, and background in one frame, I still spend an insane amount of time driving/walking/ bicycling around looking for views.  However, after 17 years of forcing myself to paint here I have become very good at seeing beauty just by stepping outside and have recently begun to experiment with larger canvases of ’small’ subjects.

Piazza Tasso in February. Oil on linen, 70 x 100 cm, 2008.

This is the real test of a great painter. When I think of the most memorable landscape paintings I’ve seen in museums, they are often of simple, unremarkable scenes which likely passed unobserved by all but the artist. I believe it is the thousands of hours spent searching for inspiration which instill in landscape painters the ability to find great beauty in such humble subjects.

Apparently I broke the commenting system back in January while changing the settings. Thanks to those who emailed me to point it out. Luckily, the new Wordpress update seems to have fixed the problem, so comment away.

The front page of the Repubblica Firenze earlier this week.

So I made the papers this week. A friend’s jewelry school was burgled a month or so ago the theives made off with 3 of my paintings. This week the police busted up the ring and in the appartment where they kept the stash there was a large collection of stolen art.

In the photos that made the papers they are holding up an old portrait of mine from ten years ago. Somewhat flattering I suppose.

I remember when I was studying painting in school there was a rash of thefts one week. The students who lost their work were upset for obvious reasons, but what was interesting was that the students whose work wasn’t stolen were also upset about the thief’s presumed offense to their skill.

Perhaps theft is really the sincerest form of flattery.

I did this copy of Anthony van Dyck’s “Three Ages of Man” over ten years ago in the civic museum in Vicenza. Its been hanging in a dark corner of my apartment for all these years, but I moved it this week and can finally photograph it. I spent over three weeks there and didn’t come close to finishing, I had to paint the old man from a photograph when I got home. The museum website lists the painting as the Four Ages of Man, but I think the woman on the right represents something else.

The people at the museum were charming. After a couple of days they let me leave all my stuff out in the room rather than packing everything up at the end of the day. It was like having my own private studio in the museum. The city of Vicenza itself is beautiful, and the Baptism of Christ by Bellini in the church of Santa Corona remains of the most incredible paintings I have ever seen (the reproduction doesn’t do it justice).

I tried a different painting technique with each of the figures. The girl I did in a complete grisaille and glazed the color over when it dried. The young man I did in a ‘colored-grisaille’ (as I had been taught in school) and then glazed the colors over the figure. The child I did in one day, trying to hit the colors right away. I think the full grisaille was probably the closest to how van Dyck painted the original, though its not a technique I have ever desired to use in my own work.

My copy is the same size as the original, which is apparently illegal. I was ignorant of this at the time and luckily didn’t get caught (not that anyone could ever confuse mine for the original). One interesting thing is that while painting it, I couldn’t see the background as the painting had darkened so much. Only later when given a large-format slide by the museum could I see that the large shape over the middle figure’s head is a Greek temple. The bright lights they used to photograph it cut through the darkened varnishes better than my eye could.

The frame on mine was made to look something like the original, but years later the painting was sent to London for the van Dyck show at the Royal Academy and the art historians changed the frame for some reason. Last time I saw the painting in Italy they had kept the new frame which looks nothing like mine. The new frame is much simpler and would have saved me a ton of money.