Imagine a Cornish fishing village, raked up even more impossibly steeply on its hillside, the grey and white houses dipped in Mediaeval red dye and pushed together so tightly that there is little more than a shoulder's width between one side of the street and the other. Then picture the entire arrangement teetering down to a tiny quayside and the blue-green water of the Mediterranean.
This is Tellaro on the Bay of Poets, where Byron swam and Shelley drowned.
Every year, when I'm teaching at Studio Paradiso, near Fivizzano in the Lunigiana, we bring a group of artists here to sketch and paint. The colours are mesmerising. On a sunny day, the red walls bounce the light around so much that when you escape from their labyrinthine twists and turns and arrive at last upon the quayside, the sea looks even greener. You get the strong impression that Sixteenth century Italians knew all there was to know about simultaneous contrast.
The quayside is too tiny for all but the smallest rowing boats but there's room for a few sunbathers. The Italians lie upon the rocks, sweltering and evincing a certain reluctance to go anywhere near the water. There are sea urchins lurking there, as I found out to my cost.
But my appointment with the sea urchins has to come later. My students are all settled on the quayside, getting to grips with Tellaro's tricky perspectives and I have to find something to paint.
But it's hot and the sun is relentless. It looks like my choice of painting is to be dictated by something far more pressing than aesthetics: shelter. There's also that constant nagging I give myself when I'm on a painting trip, to do something pedagogical.
The spot I choose is shady enough and the parapet makes a useful workbench. I have visions, however, of my No.12 sable rolling over the edge into the drink. My painting is going to be suitably pedagogic, too. You can see that I've underpainted it in dilute bistre ink. Bistre is an old colour originally derived from boiling soot. This new version is a pleasingly transparent, reddish brown and as it's waterproof, it won't lift when I put colour over it; not that there will be much colour in my painting. Tellaro is a colourful place, I know, but those steep streets and mediaeval high-rises cast wonderful shadows. And it's the drama of light and shade that I want to depict.
The dilute bistre granulates nicely, giving me natural-looking textures and the details are ticked in with a dip pen. Schmincke Translucent Orange on the steps, Cerulean in the sky. I manage to leave just enough white paper around the tops of those buildings to make the whole thing look hot and back-lit.
At the beginning of the year, I was invited by Black Swan Arts in Frome to stage an exhibition in their Round Tower Gallery, a unique stone-walled, circular space, that was originally built in the eighteenth for drying fabric. I knew instantly that I did not want the show to be a predictable resumé of all the work I’d done so far. Rather, I found it more appealing to imagine how the gallery would look if it were filled with bright, shiny new paintings, in a medium I was unfamiliar with. And then I took the idea a stage further. A dozen new paintings, I could imagine that easily, but what about one hundred? If I worked solidly from May to November, painting abstracts, still-life, portraits, landscapes and everything in between, what would my one hundredth painting look like? And what kind of painter would I have become?
