October, 2004

Portability and "finishability": As this wasn't intended to be a pure painting trip, more a holiday with some painting fitted into the slow moments, I determined to carry only the lightest, most portable art materials. Thus, a Cotman watercolour box, a single Isabey squirrel-mop travel brush, pencils, an eraser, my handmade 10 x 11 inch (1/6th of an imperial sheet) sketchbook of Arches 140# cold-pressed paper, and the Moleskine sketchbook.We had absolutely limited amounts of luggage (only carry-on) as we were determined to be mobile and unencumbered, travelling without a car and moving around on foot, by train and by bus.

"Finishability" means I didn't want to bring home a pile of unfinished work, but wanted to see what I could complete on the road. Some of the sketches are very unfinished.

The Snapshot vs. The View: the two great travel painters of all time, in my opinion, were J.M.W. Turner and John Singer Sargent. Sargent, active around the turn of the 20th century, was very influenced by the look of the camera snapshot (following Degas's lead) and produced an enormous number of intimate, cropped views. Turner, painting before the camera was invented, painted spontaneous, almost abstracted views of places like Venice; in many cases when he was travelling he was documenting scenes which were later engraved and printed as popularly priced sets; in other cases, he painted very spontaneously by way of preparation for larger studio oils (Sargent did the same, but also used photographs for his studio oils and very rarely painted long views like Turner's).

On previous trips, I've painted the sort of cropped, intimate scenes that are like snapshots. This time I tried to pull back and record long views, such as the one of Firenze and the view from the tower in Lucca.These are the sorts of images that a camera mostly fails at, as cameras distort space, exaggerate the foreground and flatten the background to such an extent that the sense of a real 3-dimensional vista is usually lost. With a painting, even a small one, you can lay out the landscape on the paper the way your mind's eye sees it.

Technical Questions: Many of these watercolours fit rather uneasily into the no-man's land between drawing and painting. Because of the reasons of portability I mention above, I strictly limited the amount of gear I wanted to carry, but ran into the problem of always painting on dry paper. This, not surprisingly, is an occupational hazard of painting outdoors in crowded cities on hot, windy days. Nevertheless, the early pictures, especially the Roman ones, really miss the ambient light. I ended up trying to wet the paper with a tiny sponge, which was very messy and inadequate. Next time, definitely, I would make room in the bag for a small spray bottle. Otherwise, the kit worked well, and I would drag it around again, modifying the sketchbook slightly to 8 or 9 x 11 inches so that it wasn't quite so heavy to carry – it was about 3 pounds for 96 pages and a cover. Realistically, a book of about 32 sheets/64 pages would be enough for a trip of a month or so.

The Ponte Vecchio in Firenze (Florence). Within sortie distance of the swarms of pickpockets who hang around the bridge, therefore I put everything from my pants pockets into my shirt pocket and stood against the wall above the Arno River with the book and paints on the railing.

I quite like the softness of this one, although it's too pale and could have benefited from underpainting on wet paper.

Lucca from the Torre Guinigi. As the roofs aren't underpainted in yellow, the picture loses the golden richness of the afternoon light. Anyway, it was a really difficult place to paint, book on knees, back aching, swarms of point-and-click tourists pushing by, then rushing back down the myriad steps, their memories safely captured. The Torre Guinigi (below) is distinctive above the Lucca rooftops due to its crown of olive trees growing in large planters.

St. Peter's and the Vatican from the Pincio. A day of very flat light, and an awkward place to draw and paint. Again, there was the flat top of the pier of a stone wall that allowed me a place to stand, but there was also a rather annoyed vendor of coloured prints of Roman scenes – annoyed because passersby were distracted from examining his wares by me.

This really could have benefited from some underpainting onto wet paper with a cadmium yellow mixture to get a richer tone.

The following day, the Colosseum and the Via Sacra from the Palatine Hill, the myriad brightly coloured ants dotting the pavement of the Forum below.

Like the one above, it need an underpainting, but ... no time! Too many people. Time for a drink!

Some mornings in Cortona the clouds flooded into the valley on the north side of the town (the triste, gloomy side according to the locals, where Frances Mayes bought her "Under the Tuscan Sun" villa). The cemetery occupies a bank below the town wall, the land falling away steeply behind it into the valley. The far hillside, dark blue in the morning light, was visible above the cloud bank.

Santa Maria Nuova on the north side of Cortona. I was able to wet the paper and underpaint, giving a much richer and stronger texture to the details applied later with relatively dry brush.

These ones from Cortona have much better, more authentic light to them than the ones from Rome where I was more besieged by traffic and other tourists.

The view from the Cortona villa looking along the valley south to Lake Trasimeno. The straggle of buildings in the distance follow the railway line from Camucia to Chiusi.

Again, underpainted with a cadmium yellow wash, then detailed with blues and a green made of viridian and burnt umber.