Marc Dalessio

Here, quickly, are a few of the sketches from my trip to lake Como this week. We stayed above Varenna at the beautiful Castle di Vezio (if anyone is looking for an exceedingly picturesque agritursimo around the lake).

View of Bellagio. Oil on panel, 20 x 30 cm.

Monte di Tremezzo. Oil on panel, 25 x 35 cm.

Ben Fenske and I had a painting competition for the view above. We bet our cars and I thrashed him. Too bad I wouldn’t know what to do with a purple Opel station wagon. (To be fair, the last time we had a paint-off he won by a mile).

The Ferry Landing at Varenna. Oil on panel, 20 x 30 cm.

Varenna from the Port. Oil on canvas, 18 x 25 cm.

The clothesline at the Torricella.

My wife asked me a year ago why I only own blue shirts.

It is actually for landscape painting. If you paint with the canvas in the shade you are probably standing in full sunlight (I don’t use an umbrella), in which case the color of the shirt will reflect on your painting and affect the hues. A few years ago I had a favorite orange T-shirt my brother gave me, and a couple of times I went painting with it on and had to go back to the house to change as the reflected orange was so distracting. I’ve also tried with black, but if I’m up against a hedge or in an area with very little reflected light I find the canvas can be too dark. White can also be annoying as you see your shirt reflected in the painting.

At the end of the day, a sky-blue shirt is the best for plein air landscape painting. I like mine with long sleeves in case of excess sun or mosquitoes. A shirt-pocket is useful for glasses or my superior Korean ipod.

With landscape season in full swing I thought I’d do a post about my favorite historic landscape painters. I’ve added the names in Cyrillic in case you want to check Google images for more work.

First and foremost, Isaac Levitan (Исаак Левитан):

Vladimirka Road by Isaac Levitan. Oil on canvas, 79 x 123 cm, 1892

March by Isaac Levitan. Oil on canvas, 60 x 75 cm, 1895.

Birch Forest by Isaac Levitan. Oil on canvas 1885-1889

Isaac Levitan has been my favorite landscape painter from the first time I saw his work in reproduction. A few years ago I went to Russia and was almost in tears in front of the original paintings (though that could have also been the vodka hangover). His technical prowess is astonishing when you see the paintings in person. Some of his brush work would be gimmicky in the hands of anyone else. For example, in one painting of an old wood barn, he laid on impastos, then glazed them, then lightly wiped off the glaze so the darker color stayed just in the ‘valleys’ of the impasto. It works from a distance, but, amazingly, it works also if you ’sniff’ (in the words of Gilbert Stuart) the painting. I’ve never seen anyone who could pull that trick off, and I have tried it myself a few times with terrible results.

“In Birch Forest”, pictured above, half of the painting appears to have been done with the same unmixed transparent green pigment, and the changing hue and high chroma in the glazing on the whites of the tree-trunks is alone worth the trip to Moscow.

The variety of his subjects and compositions has always inspired me. But most of all, the sense of meaning he instills in every painting. When you look at his landscapes there is something so much greater than just simply the view being depicted. His best landscapes are filled with a profound philosophical meaning beyond anything I’ve seen painted before. For me, this is art at its highest level. Recalling the French academicians with their hierarchy of painting which held landscape in third place, I think “they never saw a Levitan”.

Ivan Shiskin (Иван Шишкин):

A Rye Field by Ivan Shishkin. Oil on canvas, 107 x 187 cm, 1878

The baby bear paintings I can do without, but the painting above is one of my all time favorites. I love the personality in each of the trees. My wife wants a large landscape for our apartment (we can’t afford one of mine) so I plan on copying it. If I had to have any painting on my wall it would be this one.

Vasily Vasilyevich Vereshchagin (Васи́лий Васи́льевич Вереща́гин):

Vereshchagin. Hazreti Shakh-i-Zindeh Mausoleum in Samarkand. 1869-70

Vereshchagin. Chuguchak Doors

Vereshchagin, The Taj Mahal at Agra

Here is a painter I had never heard of until I visited Russia. His work was incredible when I saw it in the museums. They didn’t have the artist’s names in English so I copied down the Cyrillic characters on a piece of paper and took it to bookstores afterwards, only to find that books on Vereshchagin are few and far between. The reproductions I’ve found on the internet are also less than ideal so you’ll just have to take my word for how good this guy was. Apparently he was an officer in the Russian army and traveled across Asia on campaign, painting  these gems. I assume they were painted from life, as it is hard to imaging how else he could have done them.

The paintings of Samarkand in Uzbekistan were especially stunning. One of my favorites was a stetch of the Medrasah Shir-Dhor at Registan place in Samarkand. (It was also interesting to see difference between the small plein air sketch in which the place looks like a quiet historic site with a few market stalls, and the larger, dramatic studio painting with camels, heads on poles and raving Central Asian warriors).

His later studio work from Munich of large, crudely painted battle scenes I was less fond of, but I can imagine how someone with the sensitivity to create the plein air sketches above could have been affected by the brutality and horror of nineteenth century military campaigns.

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.

This week I have a few paintings in the BADA Antiques and Fine Art Fair in London with the old master dealer Constantine Lindsay. The Fair is held in the Duke of York Square in Chelsea (near Sloane Square) from the 25th to the 31st of March. The stand is A28, to the rear left of the fair as you walk in. More information on the BADA website.

Many of my better paintings from last year (as well as the Gstaad sketches from January) have gone into this show. You can see some of the work on Constantine’s website.

After a week of polishing things up, here are some of the sketches from Myanmar. There are no titles on the images yet as I have to get a map out and find the names of all the places and pagodas. These are the smaller paintings, the larger ones are still on the easel, so to speak.

I’m trying a new plug-in to display them. You can use the fancy PicLens screen or just click on the thumbnails to enlarge the images.

Let me know if you have any problems.

[View with PicLens]

My suitcase-of-paintings safely back in the studio.

Opening the box slowly for the rat/gecko/spider check.

I spend an inordinate amount of time discussing this with my fellow painters. With the new security restrictions on airplanes and the airlines trying to squeeze more money out of passengers with weight limits, traveling with a large amount of painting equipment is getting harder and harder.

I’ve never traveled with turpentine, or anything I felt was dangerous, yet I have still had equipment taken from me at airports. Often in big American airports, when I would have difficulty getting through the screening, just changing to another x-ray station would get me through. It seems to often be just the decision of one individual whether or not tubed oil paint is dangerous.  Once I had an agent take all my hand ground paint because the tubes were unlabeled. When I protested that I had made them myself he said that I should make my own labels too. So I did. I named my brand ‘Safety Series’ and had labels professionally printed to fit my tubes. That worked until the 100ml rule, and now its just easier to send them in my baggage. My (non-flammable) medium goes in a shampoo bottle, the Canada balsam smells like conditioner anyways.

Turpentine can be bought almost everywhere. The problem many people have is that they go looking for ‘art supply stores’ rather than the ‘chemical shops’ where most people buy turpentine in countries without large numbers of oil painters.

On this trip I was hit with massive overweight fees both going out and coming back. Luckily I was able to talk them down both times. The smart thing to do these days is what all of my fellow painters did, which is put everything heavy (including the box-easel) into the biggest carry-on that you get away with. One even filled his jacket pockets with books and cameras and other heavy objects.

Overall I’ve had good luck with Airport security. If you try to make things easy for them, they are usually accommodating to the fact that we are not the average traveler.

Maung Thiha painting near the Sulamani temple.

While in Bagan I was fortunate enough to meet a group of Burmese landscape painters centered around a teacher, Maung Thiha. They work mostly in watercolor en plein air, and paint in acrylics from photos in their studios. Apparently, a century ago, a Burmese painter (whose name I forget) studied in London and then returned to Myanmar to teach at the art school in Mandalay. Today there are a number of working painters and teachers artistically descended from this one individual.

Lin perched on a pagoda, near the Sulamani temple.

Having local painters to show me the best spots (and drive me around on their scooters) helped immensely. In exchange, I left them painting equipment and took some of Maung Thiha’s watercolors to try to sell for him in the off-season. Here are a couple of his watercolors, contact me if you are interested in purchasing one of these gems.

Burma Road by Maung Thiha. 30 x 40 cm, watercolor. (SOLD)

Dhammayangyi at Dawn by Maung Thiha. 35 x 25 cm, watercolor, 2009.

On the last day, the maestro asked me if I would paint his portrait. I only had time for a short sketch, but one of his students filmed the whole thing and I tried my best to explain sight-size portraiture while working.

Sight-size portraiture in New Bagan.

The portrait sketch after an hour or so.

We also had a small exhibition towards the end of the trip and invited the local artists. It was quite interesting to get their feedback on what subjects they liked from our oeuvre. One problem I had when they were trying to show me their favorite spots was that they wanted to paint the ruins which looked like European ruins, whereas I was interested in the more exotic (to me) subjects. I got the feeling they were a bit bored of painting temples and pagodas (there are almost 3000 in the 20 mile radius around them).

Our end-of-the-trip exhibition.

The interaction with this group of painters was probably a high point of the trip. If anyone else is planning a plein air excursion to Myanmar and will be passing through Bagan, I would highly recommend you stop by the Heritage gallery in New Bagan and ask them to show you the good spots.

Plein air painting at the Shwezigon Pagoda.

I just got back this morning from a month of plein air painting in Bagan, Myanmar. The trip was very productive and I managed to paint almost 40 sketches in 28 days. Everything is still packed up in the studio but I’ll put some of the work up when after I’ve polished it up. In the meantime here are some images of the trip.

You can see all the posts on the Myanmar trip here.

The gang scouting outside of the Shwezigon Pagoda

Anna scouting near the Soe-min-gyi Pagoda.

Pushing the limits of what you can carry with a Julian box-easel.

Justin, Anna and I heading off in the morning.

A much better way to move around in 35°C heat, thanks to the local plein air painting group.

My studio on the banks of the Irrawaddy River.

The Joys of plein air painting.

Having grown up in the tropics and then in Southern California, I have always been fascinated by snow. Here in Tuscany winters are also rather gray, so every year I try to get some plein air painting done in the snow. Luckily I’m just a short drive away from some of the most picturesque Alpine scenes in the world.

This week I was offered the use of a Chalet in the small village of Saanen, just outside of Gstaad in Switzerland in exchange for one of the sketches and I jumped at the chance. Gstaad itself isn’t very paintable, but the neighboring villages, Saanen, Gsteig, Lauenen, and Rougemont are all very beautiful.

The village of Saanen.

An old friend, Calyxte Campe, happened to be painting there at the same time (and had already done extensive scouting, conveniently for me), so the two of us painted together for the week.

Calyxte and I above Rougemont.

Painting plein air in the snow can actually be quite comfortable. On the days when it was really cold I tried the ‘Hibbard Mitten’ (thanks Darren!), which is basically a large knit sock on your painting hand which you poke your brush into. This way you can hold the brush with your bare hand inside the sock. It takes some getting used to holding the brush so far back on the handle, but you have much better control than trying to paint with a glove. I also used those little hand-warmer packets under my toes in my shoes.

Here are a couple of the sketches, I’ll put the whole series on my Artipolis site when I’ve finished them (I liked the old Swiss barns and farmhouses a lot).

Barn at Lauenen. 25 x 35 cm, oil on board.

Farm above Rougemont. 25 x 35 cm, oil on board.

The Church at Saanen. 30 x 20 cm.

Above Turbach. 20 x 30 cm