Tuscany in Montmartre Paris May 2009

Last year I traveled with a small tripod easel that folded down small enough to fit in my suitcase and weighed only 2 1/2 pounds and a painting kit that fit in my backpack-personal item carry-on.  My kit was made up of ten tubes of paint(the paint rode in the checked luggage), five brushes, a homemade brush holder that I could tie to the easel, a partial pad of palette paper still attached to the stiff backing board that it came on, ten sheets of 9x12 canvas paper, two 9x12 canvas boards, one to use as a surface to tape a sheet of canvas paper to, to attach to the easel, and another to act as a flat surface to lay on the stone bag of the tripod so I could set things down, a few small rags and some paper towels torn from the roll, and a partial roll of blue painter's tape. Rather than take solvent to clean my brushes, I would paint with wiped brushes and then clean them later with a product called Jack's Linseed Oil soap.

So there I was with all of this painting gear that I had spent months planning and preparing to transport to Europe using as little weight and space as possible,  and two things happened that prevented me from using it. First I was too shy to go outside and paint in public(I'm just not that good at outdoor painting), and second, we moved around so much (and drank a lot of wine at night) that I didn't have time or energy(read fine motor skills) to paint. It was stressful.

Toward the end of our trip, we were in Arezzo, Italy waiting for the train to take us to Milan, to catch an airplane to Paris, and I was looking at the postcards for sale in the coffee shop. I saw this beautiful blue and green and red-poppy landscape photo post card from I-have-no-idea-where in Tuscany, and I thought that it would make a nice painting.

I have learned over the years that you can rent an apartment with a full kitchen just about anywhere, and nine times out of ten the nightly rate is considerably less than a three-star hotel, plus there is a kitchen for cooking, or just reheating food bought from street vendors. It makes traveling more interesting and less expensive, plus you get to live with the people who live in that city.  In Paris last year we rented an apartment in Montmartre, the village on the hill overlooking the city, where the basilica of Sacre Couer towers above everything.  There is a square called Place du Tertre in Montmartre and every day and most of the night, year round for probably 100 years, artists have rented space in the square where they paint and sell their paintings.  Our apartment overlooked this square.  It was glorious!  But now I was really shy about going outside to paint!

So our little apartment had a very nice living room with a table and chairs, a sofa and an easy chair for Chris, and a telelvision.  And room to paint. One night when I had some self-restraint and drank only half a bottle of wine with dinner, I set up my easel, got my paint kit out, and did this painting, copied from the post card that I had bought in the train station in Arezzo.  Now, copying is what artists do for a long long time before they move on to original work(if they ever do, I believe that artists copy period.  They copy from nature, they copy from life, they copy what is in their head).  Traditionally, art students would spend years copying paintings from the masters in museums as part of their education.  So that is what I am doing except I don't have museums where I live so I use my photos and....my postcards.

I am very pleased with how this little piece turned out.  The blue sky is very saturated(I had to mix paint to get the color; it is part of the process of learning to paint, and the reason why I carried only ten colors)but that did not come through in this photograph, and the foreground is a tad washed out and some detail is lost due to the average quality of the photograph that I took this morning to post it here.  But it's still pretty nice.  Someday I'm going to paint it larger, probably 16x20 or maybe 18x24.

So I painted  a picture of Tuscany in Paris!

As a closing note, I'm not too shy to paint outside anymore.  Now if I can just drink a little less wine at night.....