All set!

Last painting finished!

Now I'm finishing off framing, packing, cleaning and looking forward to getting on the road to Le Havre and the ferry across to the UK. More than that, I am looking forward to a night somewhere new, and as yet unknown, in France and a delicious evening meal.

Monte Amiata

Here are four more ready paintings for my exhibition (which I know I've shown before on this blog), but, at least, they have dry paint! I am now working on two canvases, which I'm trying hard to finish by the time we set off from here in SW France, on Monday the 30th February. They may well turn out to be a bit of a problem with smeary paint surfaces in Robert's car and he won't be happy if he finds blobs of oil paint inside it, after our journey to London.

Where I live in Tuscany, we are very near Tuscany's highest mountain, Monte Amiata where you can even ski in the winter ... well, it's a bit rough going for the smart set, but it's wonderfully located in the woods, and has a great little bar at the top where you can eat grilled sausages and have hot wine, before slithering down the so-called black run. Then you can have a glass of grappa at the bottom to recover. I love it!

I have a fascination with Amiata,  dominating the sky, as you look south from Montisi. Its colours change from season to season and according to the time of day. It also has weather forecast properties, in that you can see a change of weather coming in from the Mediterranean side of its slopes.  We used to live in Rapolano Terme, where the old people told us that if you see Monte Amiata with its hat on, it's time to take an umbrella ….. and invariably this turns out to be correct. So many times I knew we would most likely not be flying in the morning, because of Amiata having put its hat on.

This is exciting for me!

In terrible weather in May (it even snowed!), I went  down to Civita Castellana to paint in the footsteps of painters on their grand painting tour, such as Corot, Thomas Jones and Turner, who would stop there at a cheery hostelry down below the town.  It was an ideal place to break their journeys to Rome and spend their days drawing and painting the extraordinary surrounding countryside.

I am hoping to return there in June this year and continue to paint in what I have found to be an exciting landscape. The plan is that quite a few of us foreign artists will put our work together in an exhibition in the middle of September 2012 and I have just had notice that the "comune" of Civita Castellana has produced a calendar for 2012 and I get February, which seems to augur well, since it's the month of my London show.

The top painting is by Bidauld, Jean Joseph Xavier Mount Soracte 1790 oil on paper.
I now know that all those painters travelled light with sheets of sized watercolour paper and not canvas. Also it would have been much more difficult in those days, as there were no tubes of paint and they had to cope with small quantities of colour wrapped in animal bladders, as in the photograph of ones I found here in France. I dread to think of the mess I would have got into using these!

The lower photograph is of a small painting I did last May, but I had the good fortune to be working with modern tubes of paint. This work is on a small canvas, but I am sorely tempted to give watercolour paper a go when I return later on this year.

The exhibition is titled;
"Con gli occhi degli artisti stranieri - Through foreign eyes"
Una mostra a Civita Castellana dal 19 al 26 settembre

All over the place!

Since I last put up a post, we've been in Italy (where I was painting until the moment we left for Dorset, England) for a mega family Christmas which was organised by Robert's niece in a large comfortable farmhouse on beautiful, wild and muddy Eggardon ... then back to Montisi (Italy) to pack everything I might need for my exhibition in the middle of the busy post new year social life ... then back in the car for France with the dog ... and now back in the little French house with all the difficulties of speaking (trying to speak) another language, although I am lucky living in an Occitan area where the older people seem to understand a bit of Italian when I'm really stuck.

So, here I am finishing off my last painting, sorting frames and cataloguing my work in the warmth of the kitchen. As I searched my very chilly studio for something, I stumbled across this painting, which for some reason I had completely forgotten about what with all this moving around. I painted it in the great heat of August, near the small town of San Giovanni d'Asso. The place from where I wanted to paint was in a lay-by (always a mistake!) and I was mightily offended when nervous English holiday makers stood behind me for ages, until the man stumbled towards me and said, "Er ... excuse me, but are you Sheppard Craig?" I did have a baseball cap on to shade my eyes, and I was wearing shorts, but to mistake me for a man who must be at least 6ft 4ins was a bit upsetting to say the least.

Sheppard is a good friend of mine and was a very distinguished painter until the gardening bug got hold of him and he has been making and designing the most amazing set of gardens in the woods near San Giovanni d'Asso, while his wife Frances Lansing, also a brilliant painter, has been making whimsical and beautiful sculpture works for this magical place.

Here are two links;

1. About the garden http://www.laragnaia.com/EN/intro/
2.  And some lovely photos  http://www.flickr.com/photos/dermod/sets/1448135/

Almost there....

I'm taking a break today and going off to lie in a pool of hot water ... it is Sunday after all, as well as being a dull drizzly day.

I think I'm almost there for my exhibition with just one more aerial painting finish. Hooray!

Struggling!

With Christmas racing towards me, since I know we must leave for a big family Christmas in Dorset, I am racing against the clock to finish my last painting ideas for my London exhibition. These are oil paintings measuring 80cms x 50cms (there are three others started) and it's on a continuing theme of trying to capture the feeling of flight over land. It has been so many years that I have flown in the balloon and wanted to do this, that I hoped that the London exhibition would be the ideal time to show these works.

Although this, the first painting, has been a bit tricky to resolve, it's been fun to trace my way through the Sienese countryside that I know like the back of my hands after the many years I've driven chase to my husband's balloon and enjoyed it from the air.

French veggie gardens

I love French "potagers"; a wonderful mix of flowers, vegetables, vines and farm animals. Maybe next year I will try and do more around this theme; large paintings even!

Still trying to finish the last works for my London exhibition and the deadline is looming .....aargh! Time to displace this activity and make another cup of coffee.