DOWNTOWN SORRENTO

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The down town area of Sorrento is the old part of town made up of narrow winding alleys and streets just wide enough for a small, thin car.

Cruise ships stop off in the port so the shops and markets in the down town area are always crowded and hectic.

Cheap leather goods, inlaid timber products and all sorts of fresh food are available. There are bars and cafes everywhere and competition for patronage is fierce. There are three cafes within a hundred meters of one another all offering the best Cappuccino in the world.

Not surprisingly, Italy has some incredible churches and Sorrento has some great examples

When space is lacking to build great, sprawling cathedrals, the Italians have perfected the optical illusion of constructing a small room and painting it to appear cavernous and spectacular.

Not all shopping is done in the down town markets. This guy has a truck loaded with bargains. Anything you could possibly want so long as its made out of plastic.

Small motor scooters are the preferred mode of transport for most of the population of Sorrento. Parking them under religious icons guarantees safety no matter where or how fast they are driven – even while texting, smoking a cigarette or carrying a case of wine.

Folks without access to religious icons opt for a safer means of transport.

Even the police choose to live dangerously, cutting through hoards of suicidal commuters on these uncontrollable wheeled pogo sticks. It says a lot for Italian optimism – How do you pull over a speeding Ferrari on one of these things?

Not everyone succumbs to the adrenalin rush of all day peak hour madness. These incredibly underpowered, three wheeled Piaggios are favored by many of the elderly Italians with a need to move a very small amount of stuff around very slowly at maximum decibels.

Of course, if you have a large amount of stuff to move around, then you go for a big car.

SORRENTO – ITALY

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After 36 hours sitting in planes, airport lounges, buses and taxis, we finally arrived in Sorrento. Unfortunately, we parted company with our luggage in Frankfurt. We were assured, in fractured English, by an overstressed baggage attendant at Naples airport that our bags would arrive in a couple of days. Fortunately she was right.

Sorrento is a busy little town, looking across the Bay of Naples to Mt Vesuvius.

It is a popular holiday destination and at peak season must be pretty hectic. The beaches are black volcanic sand and are mostly sectioned off and privately controlled.

For a few Euro you can hire a deck chair and a patch of sand, a few Euro more gets you a colored umbrella and with a hefty investment you can also secure a small, brightly colored change room. All very organised!

Mt Vesuvius dominates the landscape across the bay. This photo looks pretty exciting but the cloud is just a regular rain cloud, not a billowing  plume of volcanic ash.

Most of the shoreline around Sorrento is sheer cliffs of volcanic rock with buildings clinging precariously to the edge

As the sun sets into the Mediterranean, visitors flock to spectacular vantage points to photograph one another and drink Prosecco and Peroni.

Some of the Grand old Hotels are situated on the cliff tops, but have elevators to deliver guests to their little beach side annexes below.

Once on the beach, visitors have a variety of ocean going vessels at their disposal.

One of the great features of Sorrento is what must be one of the most extreme hairpin bends in the world. This ancient piece of road design explains why such a busy town has such short buses.

At the bottom of the hairpin bend the road loops around to bring you out at the port where swarms of commuters on motor scooters arrive early each morning to catch a ferry across the bay to Naples.

The regions rich, volcanic soil and mild climate grows amazing flowers and produces three crops of citrus fruit a year.

Scattered through Sorrento are numerous citrus orchards covered with lattice and shade cloth. They must be part of the towns tradition because, even with three pickings per year, there is no way the multi million Euro plots of land could even pay the land rates.

Cyclists in Sorrento dispense with helmets and reflective clothing and adopt a more sensible form of typically Italian bicycle safety.

Tomorrow our workshop group arrives and we will head of to some of the fantastic painting locations around the town.

PAINT BY ACCIDENT

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There is nothing like a looming magazine deadline to speed up the painting process. I had just finished an article on controlling color temperature for International Artist Magazine and realized I didn’t have an example of a dominant warm painting using a cool contrast. Rather than go through paintings I already had, I decided to work on a sketch I did along one of the little back canals in Venice.

Most of this painting was done using a 1″  bristle brush. I attacked it mercilessly using watercolor and pots of premixed acrylic and gesso, splashing the paint on and feathering it out with a 3″ Hake brush. This quickly covered the paper and provided the area of light at the focal point. Once the dark shapes were scrubbed in with the 1″ brush, I used a charcoal pencil to define the details – again very quickly and accidentally – sort of like draw first and ask questions later. After all this a small brush added all the details – bricks, window frames, striped awning etc.

It is a fantastic way to work, pushing and shoving until things somehow work themselves into place. The hardest thing is learning not to be careful until it is absolutely necessary! The beauty of building up a painting in layers like this means you really can’t go wrong – things can continually be worked over and changed.

A rough looking collection of brushes, but perfect for this type of painting.

  • A charcoal pencil
  • 1/4″ flat One Stroke
  • #1 Liner Brush
  • 1/2″  Bristle Brush
  • 1″ Bristle Brush
  • 3″ Hake Brush

FLY SHOTS

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Occasionally one of these weird green blowflies get trapped against the big gable skylight in my studio. I picked this one up the other day, set him up with a light and took some photos. I used  an old 28mm vivitar close focus lens with a 1.4x converter. It is a great, sharp lens and despite it 30 year+ age, still works perfectly on my Pentax K20D. All functions are manual, but the camera will still automatically set the speed to suit the selected aperture. It also beeps and flashes a red square indicating where correct focus is occurring. Not bad for backwards compatibility!

They sure look interesting when you look at them this close.

MORE CHOOKS

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After playing around with watercolor and gouache for a while, I somehow drifted on to acrylic and ink in an effort to capture the wild, manic character of these killer chickens. I always took chickens for granted. It’s not till you start to draw them that you come to realize – behind all that innocent scratching and clucking lies a vicious, terrifying bird of prey!

Here are three more.

“Leghorn Watching” – Gouache, Acrylic, Ink, Watercolor and Charcoal.

“Rhode Island Red – Best of Breed” – Gouache, Acrylic, Ink, Watercolor and Charcoal.

“Black Australorp Considering”– Gouache, Acrylic, Ink, Watercolor and Charcoal.

WATERCOLOR CHICKEN

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Over the past couple of months I have been busy working on a new book, which means I am madly leaping from one subject to another. Somehow I ended up choosing a chicken to demonstrate the different qualities of watercolor and Gouache. I hope to have the book finished before the end of the year. A step by step guide to painting this chicken will feature in book. It combines clear washes of watercolor and the opaque flatness of gouache to get that fantastic contrast between glowing transparency and flat, velvety gouache.

This type of subject is a lot of fun, I love the contrast between fine detail and loose abstraction. The face of the chicken leaves nothing to the imagination, but as the eye moves down the neck, things get a little out of control – just like a chicken tearing around in a chicken coop.

French Ultramarine Blue, Permanent Alizarin, Windsor Red, and Quinacridone Gold  with White Gouache provided all the necessary colors.

A few one stroke brushes and a rigger took care of the detail and the 1/2 inch bristle brush made all the mess.

The book should be available towards the end of the year. As soon as it’s out I will put a link on my website

SILENT ECHOES

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Over the past couple of weeks I have been busy working on this large (1500×900) acrylic, charcoal and ink painting. It is based on a large sandstone wall, towering over a rock pool in the Umbrawarra Gorge, south of Litchfield National Park in the Northern Territory. Apart from the spectacular appearance of the place, the thing that impressed me was the strange silence, broken by occasional disjointed echoes. The sounds of distant birds, insects and breezes all seemed to emanate from the rocks, always punctuated by long periods of silence. Hidden through the rocks was evidence of faded aboriginal rock paintings.

I used colored acrylic glazes over white areas of gesso to get a transparent glow into some of the rock shapes. These are contrasted with solid opaque patches of similar colored acrylic. When the paint was dry I drew over it with charcoal pencil (black and white) and Burnt Sienna pigment ink. The most difficult part of this painting was getting the abstract marks right. It took a lot of looking and adjusting until everything seemed to fall into place. What I like about this process are the intricate, underlying textures that build up. Painting like this really makes me appreciate the work of  Franz Kline. He seems to effortlessly create the most beautiful abstract marks – perfectly balanced and proportioned, right from scratch.