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.
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 Senese 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.
