To Rome With Love (2012): review 2/10

The stories of various characters in Rome, including a young architect and his older correspondent, a music producer and and opera singer played by Benigni.

It feels as if Allen made up this film as he went along, trusting to fate or depending on cliche to guide him. The pacing is awful, the jokes sink.  Allen himself is irritating, as is Benigni and one leaves the film grateful for the end.

The film fails to celebrate Rome, or even American presumptions about it, as Allen's previous Parisian film managed to do.

People Like Us (2012): review: 1/10

In California, the father of a self regarding young salesman dies. The salesman meets his father's illegitimate daughter and despite already having an attractive partner, becomes emotionally embroiled in her life, and that of her son.

The film degenerates rapidly into a soap opera format, with contrived melodramatic exchanges. The lead exudes self satisfaction, as if he would really prefer to be in an advertisment for hair shampoo. The others actors are not much different. The plot is preposterous. No one can act, and they are all too good-looking.

Utterly phoney: avoid.

Nackt (Naked) (2002): review: 7.5/10

Three discontented young German couples meet at a dinner party where they engage in a peculiar bet.

Imaginatively shot and fast-scripted film about romantic, sexual, and occasionally financial tensions between young Germans, who treat each other with gratuitous unkindness, behaving with distinct shrillness, in accordance with cultural stereotypes.

The Flock (2007): review: 3.5/ 10

An overenthusiastic probation officer, played by Richard "gerbils" Gere, is joined by a young woman, who is shortly to replace him, They pursue sex offenders with surprisingly eccentric tastes in New Mexico. Manichean, he exceeds his remits.

This is a Silence of the Lambs revisit, with a little dash of Dirty Harry thrown in, but one which lacks the interpersonal tensions necessary to animate it. The narrative is not easy to follow either.

Painting in Tuscany; thanks and thoughts

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Viareggio, Tuscany, oil on card, 12 x 14.5 cm

Well, that brings to a close my trip.

It was a wonderful trip and I want to thanks everyone who helped me: my parents,the people in Tuscany, Steve in the Beehive Hotel in Rome for restaurant recommendations,  Julie for company over dinner, and to Patrizia in Bari for taking me to Monopoli and buying me beer.

And many thanks to Sarah and Stefano in Tuscany for their hospitality and meals.

Other pleasant encounters were the sweet guy in the Lecce who runs the tourist information for giving me a ride on his scooter with my luggage, pleasant if surely eccentric hotel owners in Orvieto and the Italians in general for being kind and tolerant with ignorant British painter travellers.

***

From an artistic perspective, one always hopes there is some definitive lesson from a trip, but there rarely is.  There is a fine interview with Chuck Close and he states that all  the ideas he ever got came form the act of painting itself. Which is a way of stating, perhaps, that talking about it isn't that valuable.

 I feel more and more that this travel painting thing is analogous to fishing: you pick your equipment, your reels and hooks and lines, you think about what you want to catch and you go towards the place. And you might be luck you might not. A good number of days are  wasted and a good number of pictures are poor. I never know until some days after which are the good and the bad, and it almost embarrasses me how little I can trust my own immediate judgment.

The best paintings occur when one is in the zone, meaning that in that mindset where one is not really thinking about what one should or should not do but simply fulling engaged with whatever one is engaged with.

You know instinctively when a picture is fake or forced, but I don't know the words to  detail that instinct, and I doubt anyone else does either. Like many artists I spend my time often wanting to be another painter, one whose work I've seen and admire. Fortunately, incompetence or the mere ridiculousness of such an ambition forces me to work in way that is my own.

*

Next trip: London, Egypt and Scotland in January, if the Egyptians haven´t gone completely kookoo that is, in which case it'll be Jordan.

BETTER DROWNED THAN DUFFERS IF NOT DUFFERS WON'T DROWN



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Painting in Orvieto

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Orvieto, looking north, oil on card, 16 / 14 cm unavailable

Orvieto- looking West, oil on card, 18 / 16 cm unavailable

Orvieto is an amazingly situated city with a stunning Gothic cathedral, all very well preserved or maintained,

I tried to do the sort of tourist painting in the cathedral square that almost seems the raison d'etre for travel, but never really enjoyed it. Better were the fantastic views. The second, Orvieto- looking south,  is a sort of impressionism which isn't, in truth, really my bag. I'm a much meatier, heavier and more expressionist painter, much more interested in lumpiness than light. I've always felt a little self conscious about this, the heaviness in my pictures. I want to make this more of a virtue as it is in, say, Morandi or Courbet.

I may shift the average scale up a bit in future trips.

*

Painting in Puglia: Lecce and Bari

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Lecce, early evening, oil on card, 11 / 16 cm  unavailable

Lecce was too perfumed for the sort of painting I like to do. It felt as every square inch had been combed over, tweaked, by a team of interior designers. The town's plan is labyrinthine, and it is flat and riverless, and has no seafront, which means it lacks vistas and, moreover, becomes claustrophobic and uncomfortable on hot days.

Bari, the town, oil on card, 10.5 / 13 cm  AVAILABLE

Bari- the Adriatic, midday, oil on card, 15 / 18 cm   AVAILABLE

Bari, was considerably better, more "normal", less airbrushed for tourism. I stayed near the station in the sort of crummy hotel with a strange lift and the view of the backs of buildings, and everything painted brown, the sort of Tom Waitsian place that I like though I am not sure why as they are self-evidently quite grim.

It's nice to walk along the seafront and paint. The people seem friendly and relaxed in Bari. it would be a good place to go if you were sick and just wanted some time to get well and have simple conversations about their dogs or the temperature. There are lots of nice little shops too. Italy doesn't seem to have suffered the corporate colonisation that blighted the UK, homogenizing every high street.

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