Intro

I knew I was going to paint in Tuscany this trip (April 16-May 15, 2012). I certainly packed paints, brushes, palette, and paper. But what would I paint? Would it be straight views painted plein aire? See the (Greece, Turkey & Morocco Travel watercolor gallery for 1981 Morocco paintings.) Would it be plein aire views but with a two-color palette? (See the same gallery for 1990 Turkey paintings.) Or would it be images composed of various historic artifacts. (See the same gallery for 1995 Greece paintings.)

It turned out to be closer to the third option but with a twist. Yes, they would be composites, but the elements would be reduced to two: a sky that I would paint in Italy and a border (from my journal/sketchbook) that I would design in Italy but paint back in Baltimore. My use of skies in a composite painting actually began in France in 2007. (See the Spain & France Travel watercolor gallery for the Rochefort paintings) But those paintings were rather more complex than what I painted this time in Italy. Those had a sky, historic fragment(s), plus a trompe l’oeil additions, like the shells in Rochefort C. The 2012 Tuscan Sky paintings also harkened back to my 1995 Parade paintings, where each central image had an historic border. (See the Parades watercolor gallery).

So these new paintings would take the sky element that had been my sole subject for over 50 paintings that I began once I returned from France in 2007 (see the Sky watercolor galleries) and add an historic border such as seen in the Parade paintings. This, I hoped, would give me the immediacy of a sky and a slice of Italian Renaissance design which I love so much.

This combination also solved a logistical question which all artists need to resolve when traveling with a companion: How do you create art without taking up so much of the day doing so? The skies I would study during the day and paint from memory in the early evening or morning back at our house in Ombreglio di Brancoli, a hamlet north of Lucca, and the borders I would quickly sketch in my journal during the day.

The trick, however, was to choose a border before painting a sky, because a border had to be worked out geometrically so that the repeats in the pattern would meet at the corners properly. So I would work out a border on scratch paper and then on watercolor paper pencil in enough of the border so I would then have a window in which to paint a sky.

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