Bottling Your Painting Holiday - Part 2

I've just returned from ten fantastic days at Studio Paradiso with our hosts, Dermot and Kathryn. As we were operating out of a new venue this year, on the Torrentello Estate in the Lunigiana, we gave ourselves a little time before the students arrived to make notes and prepare...

Then all we had to do was wait for our guests.

With all the usual domestic chores taken care of by someone else (thank you, Sarah) and delicious, local food put under their noses at appropriate hours of the day (thank you Dermot and Kathryn), artists of all abilities could look forward to a whole week of undiluted, uninterrupted art... and a landscape that transforms from beguiling beauty to recalcitrant wretch with every stroke of the brush.

The problem?

Well, just what are you going to do with all that scenery?

Just how are you supposed to get all that green, all those trees, mountains, footpaths, telegraph poles and bee orchids onto your little bit of paper? Suddenly, all your colours are wrong and while you see magic all around you, all that ends up in your sketchbook is scribble.

Funny how all the "me" time that you've been looking forward to for weeks, can turn into "poor me" time in less than twenty-four hours.

Thank goodness for vino locale and Torrentello's wood-fired pizza oven, is all I can say.

 So, what's the answer?

Temper all that ambition with a little realism, I say.

The landscape is a complex phenomenon of shadows and light, of colour, sensation and memory and you're going to capture it all on a bit of mashed up wood pulp, a stick with some animal hair tied to one end and blobs of different coloured dirt mixed with glue?

 I don't think so.

Alberto Giacometti, Swiss born sculptor and painter, said that "in order to realise something" you had "to transform it." In other words, stop trying to get what's 'out there' onto your canvas and start trying to get what's 'in there' out. Pay attention to yourself and your materials. And keep asking the following question:

The fact is, the landscape will keep on changing while you're working on it. It is a repository of infinite moods. Your painting isn't. Every year, wherever I teach, I write this on the board in bigger and bigger letters.

What you end up with won't be the landscape you saw - leave that behind you, in Italy or France or wherever else you find yourself - but it will be what happened when you tried to paint the landscape you saw.

That's valid, isn't it?

Russian composer, Igor Stravinsky wrote a tremendously difficult solo for the bassoon at the beginning of his masterwork, The Rite Of Spring. Rightly daunted by the prospect of playing it before the maestro, the chief bassoonist went away and practiced and practiced until he'd got it note perfect. At the next rehearsal, however, Stravinsky was far from satisfied with the bassoonist's efforts. When he remonstrated with the composer that he'd worked hard until he could play it perfectly and that in his opinion, he'd played it faultlessly, Stravinsky told him that he didn't want the sound of someone playing it perfectly; he wanted the sound of someone trying to play it.

Every landscape is perfect, but you are only human. That's the kind of realism I admire.

Set painting for Stravinsky's The Rite Of Spring by Nicholas Roerich