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
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