The walls at Villa Le Rose. 25 x 35 cm, oil on panel.
Winter has set in and pushed me indoors so I’m currently enlarging the small sketches from this summer for shows next year. This was the last batch of Tuscan plein air sketches from the warm October we had there. They are all painted at the beautiful Villa le Rose property just south of Florence.
Daniela Astone and I have decided on locations and dates for the 2012 Plein Air Courses. The first one is already half full so if you would like a spot let me know asap.
More information over on my Course tab.
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.
A few people have asked me about the weekend workshops in July. I have an invitation to Sardinia so I wont be here this year. Instead I’ll try to do weekend workshops before then in a private garden in Florence. The dates will be the 12th and 13th, and the 19th and 20th of June from 8 to 12 in the morning. There are only a limited number of places so let me know via email if you’re interested in joining: [email protected]
Sulle Colline di Settignano, 1885
Leith, 1881
Continuing the theme of brilliant regional painters from the Californian school post below. There is a Telemaco Signorini show in Padua at the moment which I am really looking forward to seeing. Signorini has always been one of my favorite plein air painters both for his superb painting technique and the wit he instills in his best work. Such as the play of the bright colors of the advertising billboard above contrasted with the greys and browns of the Scottish town, the lone dog on the wall in End of August at Pietramala below, and the contrasting of the various levels of human endeavor between the humble, transitory vegetable garden and the grand, immutable silhouette of the Duomo in (a painting I haven’t been able to find an image of and can’t remember the title!).
Fine d'agosto a Pietramala, 1889
Una Via di Ravenna
Signorini is probably the greatest painter of the Italian light, from the dirty summer skies contrasted with bright sun-lit roads, to his exceptional rendering of the long grey autumn and winter evenings. His draftsmanship is superb, and often in the small unfinished sketches you can see how everything was meticulously drawn in pencil before he started (Paxton recounted seeing Sargent do this as well with his seemingly freehand Venetian watercolors). Signorini’s brushwork and, often, palette-knife-work is always varied and unexpected, and I would be curious to know what medium he used as the variety of edge is really impressive, from the long soft gradations of the foliage and shadows, to his razor-sharp roofs and palm fronds.
Paesaggio Toscano, 1875
Also, the museums in Italy are all free this weekend. I just spent an hour looking at the Signorini at the Pitti Modern and was the only one in the place the whole time.
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.
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I haven’t been out landscape painting this Autumn as much as I would have liked. The image above is an HDR photograph, but it gives an idea of the colors here in Tuscany at the moment.
Here is a short timelapse of a sketch for a commission up near Barberino val d’Elsa. Its a 17th century copy of the Duomo of Florence in the middle of the countryside, people often think I’m dabbling in surrealism when they see the paintings, but its really there.
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
