Italian Skies: Series Complete

When this blog was being set up early in July, I had finished 9 of the 14 Italian Sky paintings begun in the hillside hamlet of Ombreglio di Brancoli north of the small Tuscan city of Lucca. And Brooke Hall, my talented and patient webpage designer, only asked for four blog entries for each of my two blogs. Finally last week Brooke instructed me on working the back end of my website. Now I’m on my own, but presenting painting-by-painting entries on this series seems a little old. (The last sky was finished three weeks ago.) Instead this entry will be a summary of the Italian Sky series. To see all the Italian Sky series click here.

I had intended to present before and after images for each painting, such as these for Tuscan Sky 4.  And I would discuss the source of the border pattern, in this case the vining part of the border came from the La Collegiata di San Cristoforo in Barga, a hiitop town in the in mountainous Garfagnana region of northern Tuscany. The quatrefoil flowers in the corners were adapted from a carved Etruscan tomb seen in Volterra. I had to use two sources for this border because the Barga source didn’t show how this pattern would meet at a corner.

The following paintings are particularly successful. Tuscan Sky 5 turned out to be surprising. I had no idea this simple, but bold border of half circles would, once painted, make the sky seem to float in front of it. The border came from the stone pavement of Florentine church Basilica di Santa Croce.

Tuscan Sky 9 worked well because of the colors chosen for the border seem to capture and enhance the mood of the cloudy sky. The geometry of the border, from the floor of Cattedrale di San Martino in Lucca, was tricky because adjacent corners differed. Identical corners were diagonally opposite each other. I chose it because in a very flattened way the wide band wound its way around the central pole.

I’m particularly proud of Tuscan Sky 12, if only because the sky was painted in five minutes, in other words in just a single layer of paint. Wet the paper; add some paint; let it dry; you’re done. Cirrus clouds force you to work as quickly, as sparingly as possible. No building up layers of paint, my normal procedure. The border pattern is a quite literal rendition of what I sketched from the floor of the magnificent Duomo di Siena.

Lastly I’ll highlight Tuscan Sky 13 because it let me use a variation of the border seen in Tuscan Sky 5. Now the half circles become partial rings. This border was sketched in the museum beside the Pisa duomo. (If the Leaning Tower was the magnet that drew us to Pisa, it was the complex as a whole that thrilled. This is a photo taken from upstairs at the museum.

This border also seems to levitate the sky in front of it. Who needs 3D?

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