Marc Dalessio

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.

The dates will be from the 17th to the 27th of September and the cost for the ten days will be €1900 for a shared double room with everything included (food, lodging, wine(!), and we will buy materials for everyone this time, so people aren’t using poor quality equipment). Single room accommodation is available at an additional cost, and spouses are welcome at a discounted rate.

Spaces are limited so send an email to marc@ritratto.com if you’re interested in joining.

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

I’ve posted the summer plein air workshop schedule on the ‘courses’ page on my website.  Every year I take three students on weekends in June and July. We stay in a small Tuscan farmhouse about 40 minutes from Florence near Tavarnelle val di Pesa. Places are already filling up, so if you know you’ll be in Tuscany and would like to take an intensive plein air landscape painting workshop, shoot me an email and I’ll save you a spot. The house is charming but not luxurious (there is often a young family with us), and the focus of the weekend is on painting. You can click forward on the calendar below to see the dates.

There is also the possibility of using a house by the beach in Maremma in June if I get enough interest.

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.