Three from Sicily; tourism, photography and plein air painting

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I took the ferry from Malta to Sicily, staying for a couple of days in spledidly sited former Greek Empire city of Syracuse, where Archimedes lived and which features ruins of some importance.

Much of the city has recently been restored, though the place still has some rough edges.

Three from Sicily (Syracuse and Taormina)

 

 

 

 

Corso Umberto I, oil on card, 13 x 9.6 cm - discarded

Greek Amphitheatre, Syracuse, oil on card, 9.5 x 12.6

I met a charming French-Spanish couple while painting here, at this greek Apmhitheatre, which is quite enormous. Thanks to them for buying me lunch. I hope they find this site.

 

View of Taormino, oil on card 12.6 x 9.5 cm    available

 

 

 

 

Taormino is one of those places that is so touristified that it is quite unpleasant, the entire length of the main street taken up with shops selling souvenirs. The tourist industry has this amazing capacity to destroy the places and cultures that it supposedly celebrates: everything becomes commodified, including aspects of interpersonal relations.

The views  from the town, however, are quite breathtaking.

My picture owes something to Kokoschka, the itinerant Austrian, whose painting journeys might become a model for me, along with Edward Lear and the Scotsman David Roberts.

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Digital cameras have made photography easy, cheap and fast and I see tourists, including myself, wandering about snapping away, scarely seeing the world save through a lens. Given that images of most places tourists visit, quite probably of superior quality, can be found on the web, their reason for snapping must really more to do with the desire to say "I was here", than to record or understand a place.

In the face of this barrage of fast photo images there is obviously place for slower, more considered meditation on places. Plein air painting provides this.

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These paintings are for sale- for 100 Brazillian Reals or equivalent in another stable currency (at the time of writing this is roughly 58 US$ or 42 Euros or 36 GB pounds). Post, packing and handling are not included.

More details can be found under the label "buying art", below: please contact me with any enquiries.

 

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The big green hill; travel sketching; USA trip

The big green hill, oil on card, 11 x 8.5 cm

A heavy day; my mood awful throughout.

Beautiful heathland in Lagoa, under threat of suburbanisation but still a pleasant place to escape- the smell of the damp grass very pleasant and larks and butterflies everywhere.

I thought of Leonard Cohen's words from, "True Love Leaves No Traces," as I worked:

As the mist leaves no scar

On the dark green hill

So my body leaves no traces

On you, and never will

Through windows in the dark

The children come, the children go

Like arrows with no targets,

Like shakles made of snow

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A couple of days ago I passed the morning reading through an exhibition catalogue of Edward Lear's watercolours, painted on his travels: I have the idea of doing much the same on my USA trip, which is still in it's embyro stages (any help/ advice gratefully accepted: I'm especially interested in linking up with other painters in the USA, and the possibility of showing work and ideally selling some to help pay for the trip).

What is delightful about Lear is that his work is so closely tied to his experience, and even if conpositionally the pictures are often using the jaded formats of Lorrain or Poussin, it's possible to access his personality through his handling of pencil and wash.

Sketchbook work is often so; I have previously mentioned Ardizzone here, I might also mention Zymunt Turkiewicz's "Montecassino" , a very immediate album of drawings illustrating the Polish fores assault on the german stronghold in Italy (pub. 1944) and the drawing produced by Mervyn Peake as an official War Artist.

Kim's Game - work in progress 2

Pen drawing of an aesthete.



Below: Kim's Game Oil on canvas, 59 x 65 cm - stages 4 (above) and 3 (bottom)







For previous versions see:

http://tadeuszderegowski.blogspot.com/2009/09/kims-game-work-in-progress.html

and

http://tadeuszderegowski.blogspot.com/2009/08/work-in-progress.html

What has happened? I've cleaned the background, making it more uniform. The broadly triangular shape to the bottom left above he maroon oval has been refined. It reminds me of both a salt cellar and a phallus. The pink oval on the top row has been given a brown edge, which makes it seem 3-dimensional.

I am not sure if making everything sharper was really the right way to go: the gentleness of the previous shapes was part of what was appealing about them. But it is incredibly difficult- impossible, I'd say- to "go back". Paintings become more and more focused, shapes become more and more defined; insistant as you work on them- it is unavoidable.

A picture which was meant to become suggestive becomes less is as it is elaborated. And, so it seems to me, that I am best at artwork which denies equivocation.

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I am good at ink drawing because this technique has a knife-edge quality about it: there is no half-way point between failure and success. If it is good it is excellent; if not, the drawing goes directly into the bin. It isn't really possible to correct an ink drawing because you cannot erase the ink.

Oil painting of the sort above is difficult for a personality such as mine, because oil paint allows endless tampering: it can be scraped off, overpainted or wiped away, and I am unable to resist the temptation to make endless the little corrections which seem necessary but actually serve merely to reduce the force of the image.

My happiest style is akin to the quip, to an aphorism, or a rebuke. It denies regret. My paintings are like over-elaborated jokes, they are laboured: they miss the point of a quip which lies in its rapidity and surprise in a given context and not necessarily in the profundity of what is said.

Lost is concision, that much underrated quality in art. And critical here is the notion of "the gesture". There are oil painters for whom "the gesture" is an intrinsic to their vocabulary- Kokoschka springs to mind- but even so this element is less apparent in his painting than in his drawings and is more prevalant still among the draughtsmen such as Kubin, Belloc, Lear and Beerbohm who are my true companions: ironists and satirists mainly.

This sort of work is sarcastic and slight: it has wit, but sometimes lacks substance and one can become trapped in irony and that is why I shall continue to try to make oil painting work for me.