Friday 10 February 2012
Umbrian Landscapes
I have continued painting my Umbrian Landscapes and produced some larger pictures this time. These are around 40cms by 12cms using watercolour paints and ink pens on heavy cartridge paper.
The idea was to use the influence of the late Byzantine and early Renaissance artists as inspiration. Looking into their paintings, beyond the figures at the delicate landscapes in the background or the decorative architecture that often frames the figures that form the central characters in many pictures.
The landscapes and town scenes are simple, innocent and basic, the buildings and streets have an abstract quality to them. They are like the images we have of the places of our youth, of summers long ago.
Brightly coloured, muddled and juxtaposed, nothing is as it really appears but how we'd like the world to be. So too are these paintings, deliberately disjointed, out of proportion and more luminous than reality, like the holidays of long ago.
The pictures are all of the Umbrian landscape once more and show the a green and furtile provice full of hills, distant towns and isolated monasteies. Here you will find unexpected beauty in the middle of thick forest, picturesque towns as you crest a hill and gorgeous villages in the bend of a river. It is ever likely that the likes of Raphael, Perugino and Signorelli walked these paths to paint.
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