Marc Dalessio

These are a few of the paintings I worked during my free time over the past ten days. The first is from the same spot where I painting the same large landscape ten years ago. I got a bit worried at one point, “What if my painting has gotten worse?”

The Marsiliana. Oil on linen, 80 x 100 cm.

The next three are all from the same spot, just playing around with different light effects.

The Entrance to the Marsiliana, Back-lit. Oil on linen, 50 x 70 cm.

The Entrance to the Marsiliana, Overcast. Oil on panel, 25 x 35 cm.

The Entrance to the Marsiliana, Side-lit. Oil on panel, 20 x 30 cm.

I also did a bunch of little sketches while doing demonstrations, but they didn’t make the cut.

Here are a few photos from our ten day plein air course at the beautiful Tenuta Marsiliana in southwestern Tuscany.  We’re trying to find the most picturesque spots in central Italy for these workshops.

Dawn painting at the Marsiliana.

On the road up to the castle.

A little ruined church we found nearby.

Plein air on Monte Argentario

Final critiques at the castle.

Overall the trip was a great success. We had a couple of bad days with the weather, but there was a quick portrait workshop to substitute.

Next year Daniela and I will start the workshops again in May to catch wheatfield season. Hopefully somewhere south of Siena. I’ll post the dates and details as soon as I find a suitable location.

My painting of the Marsiliana from eleven years ago. 100 x 70 cm

After the success of our Trevi plein air workshop, Daniela Astone and I have decided to do a second course in Maremma (near the coast in southwestern Tuscany). As with Trevi the area is one of the more picturesque in Italy and one of my favorite places to paint. We will stay in the Marsiliana, a stunning castle/hamlet perched on a hill and near enough to the coast for day trips to the beach. It’s an area where I have already scouted extensively over the years, and I had a painting breakthrough of my own there 11 years ago so the place has a sentimental value to me.

Update: The course is now full, but Daniela and I will do more next year.

Plein air painting of Volpaia (70 x 100 cm), one of my workshop painting spots.

The plein air workshop schedules are now on my course page on my website.

{CALENDAR}

Don’t try this at home. Some blogs do a painting-a-day, I was given a house last week for 4 days and tried to make as most out of it as possible by painting as many small sketches in a day as I could. I thought I would go for ten a day. This seemed easy as the estate where I was painting is in an especially picturesque part of the upper Maremma, and I was very inspired by the landscape. I ended up working from 7:30-ish in the morning until 11 pm at night (there was a full moon, so I could paint at night).

Unfortunately I have the habit of holding my brushes with my left hand while I work, and as I painted over the course of the day I kept grabbing clean brushes while continuing to hold the old ones. By the end of the day I had held a huge mass of brushes in my hand for hours and that night I came down with severe tendinitis and a terrible fever which lasted 4 days. It still hurts today as I type, almost a week later.

Clever. Anyways, here are some of the sketches:

The Beach Road at Bolgheri

Reeds

The View from Biserno

Airplane

Stone Pines at Bolgheri

Fishermen at Cecina

Cypress at Biserno

The Beach at Bolgheri

I’ve been updating my landscape archive page on Flickr with spots to paint in Maremma. The Val di Cecina is especially beautiful. Here is the webpage again.

Here is the original post if you have no idea what I’m talking about.