Apologies for the radio silence. I am healing from my ‘orrible injury and was, as usual, trying to do everything. I sent a card to someone also having health problems and, having advised them to rest, realised I was not doing it myself. So I stopped for a while and just spent time doing my little scrapbook.
I showed you the sketches I had done from life in Tuscany.
I think there is little doubt that the landscape has given rise to the art
even the agricultural junk littering the landscape is incredibly picturesque. If you are a fan of Matthew Palmer, who is a great painting teacher, his landscapes frequently have roads leading into the distance or going round a bend in the road. In the UK he does classes in the Lake District and various places with interesting landscapes, which you need to go and find.
In Tuscany it was impossible to look in any direction and not see a potential picture. It is the geography. There was a great deal of looking out of car windows and, when looking at recently harvested fields, seeing very basic mud, in lumps; friable rich compost it definitely wasn’t. Round the villa there were olive trees, lemon trees in pots and various tame plants. If you looked twice you could see the watering system of half buried hoses. If you look at the fields in the photograph, there are hardly any flat ones and some of the fields in the distance are not far off vertical. Yes there is a lot of sunshine but the geography is not helping, at all, neither is the soil.
Tuscans must have strong thighs. Every ridge top that was not an actual knife edge had a house right on the top,
and an even higher mast on the top of the house. Everything is up, even if you are only working in that flattish field on the left behind the line of trees, you still have to walk up to the house at the end of the day when you are tired.
I went, having, I thought, just recovered from a fortnight of flu-like something. One vertical walk into a hill town was enough to convince me that my lungs were not working very well at all. Each step was like breathing sandpaper.
People who live round here must be either hard as tanned leather or dead.
I am sufficiently recovered now to have nearly finished making up the little album and, before the Christmas cards and pouring the new dolls, I have some big sketches half done, properly done and to embark on from photographs, which I intend to watercolour.
I always enjoyed portraiture, which has now finished as there weren’t enough students. Self-taught, I learned over a few years, the importance of getting the pencil lines in the right place. Now that I have had my cataracts done and can actually see the landscapes, I’m going to see if the same thing will apply to the sketched views, enlarged, and some still in my mind but prompted by photographs.
I didn’t take enough photos. My little Olympus Miu is on its last legs, the shutter is intermittently working. So I spent more time looking with my eyes than through a lens. As I am probably the last person in the world who does not have a smart phone I didn’t do any of that either. I try hard to be present in my own life, using my own five senses. When I look at the work of some of the Uffizi artists from a previous posting, I am reminded that all they started out with was their own five senses and a pencil.
And the landscape, the incredible Tuscan landscape.
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