Its full and awful grandeur

"Its full and awful grandeur" was how Charles Dickens described the ruins of the Roman Forum. It would have looked different in his day, with the arch of Septimius Severus and Column of Phocas (left) half buried, and the Basilica Julia (foreground ruins) entirely underground. The church of Luca and Martina would have looked the same, and ditto the Curia Julia (right), except for its window arrangement.

This picture is in a group show at the Westland Gallery opening this Wednesday. 

Santa Maria della Salute

Fenlands vista

A prospect of Ely cathedral

Massey College in the Snow

An acrylic on canvas from a great many years ago, when I was a student at OCAD.

the tower

The Campanile at San Barnabas in Venice, on a crisp day in June.

Annihilation of Time and Space

One of a series of paintings by Tarragon depicting the semi-abstracted view seen from the window of a speeding train.

Tuscan hillside

One of many watercolours painted while wandering in the hills north of Florence. The row of trees leading up the hill to the right shroud the path to a small renaissance church, in whose shadow I sat while I painted. It overlooks the small village of Ponte a Mensola, named for a stream you cannot see amid the trees in the picture.

It was a sunny day in May, perfect for watercolours. Here's another one I did from almost the same vantage point, but looking north rather than east.

In the bay

This isn't exactly a holiday-themed image, but I made the painting as a small Christmas gift a few years ago, so I thought I'd post it today.

Chat & Chateau

I made this for the 2015 In the Round fundraiser at Graven Feather in Toronto, which runs until the end of November. Each participating artist received 3 plywood disks, the size of a CD, to embellish as they pleased.

The picture was inspired by one of my favourite childhood illustrators, the amazing Peter Spier. His books enchanted me when I was young, and to be honest, they still do. His simple but evocative landscapes, inhabited with happy children and sparkling architecture, inspired in me a desire to see a world I was too young to even know existed.

My illustration ended up more sombre than its inspiration would suggest - but that often happens in my drawings. But hopefully someone will look at it and wonder where that road leads.

Annihilation of Time and Space

Tarragon painted a series of the landscapes visible from the window of a high-speed train. Travelling from London to Paris, he was struck by how the broad spaces of northern France were reduced to an impressionist smear by the speed of the train.

The pale form in the left hand sky is a reflection on the train window.

Florence: Via Lamione

I made this quick watercolour and india ink sketch while strolling the countryside just south of Florence.

Oaks and Wrapped Sign

Tarragon offers an English landscape of pared-down simplicity.

strolling in the suburbs

Suburbia swells. Once upon a time, Etobicoke was not part of Toronto, and Hackney wasn't in London. It's a familiar process, and it happens in the renaissance capitals of Italy as well. There, suburbs go by the charming name of fraction [frazione]. The term implies that they are part of a whole, but the relationship is often distinctly peripheral. It's easy to visit Florence, for example, without noticing its suburbs.

Some of them are, like Etobicoke or Hackney, so assimilated to the city that their independent existence resides solely in maps and signposts. Among them, Ponte a Mensola:

Some years ago I lived in the east of Florence. I could walk in 20 minutes to the city limits, and frequently did. One of those limits (the north-east) was marked by the former village of Ponte a Mensola, where a small cluster of houses adjoined a tiny stream called the Mensola.

There was nothing to distinguish the place, except that it was most of the way to Settignano, an altogether more famous location. But the cafe by the Mensola was welcoming and the streetscape moderately picturesque. The result was several pictures. You can see others here and here.

An annihilation of time and space

From the window of a high speed train, the world becomes a smear that verges on the abstract. Thankfully, the angularity of human constructions - in this case wind turbines - provides some punctuation.

This is the ninth in a series of nineteen paintings.

The view from Via Montalbano, Florence

Far in the eastern regions of Florence, above the loop in the Arno which enfolds San Jacopo al Girone, the Via Montalbano winds up into the hills.
One day in May I climbed it all the way to the dead-end, past ruined farmhouses, late renaissance villas, and the occasional lone cypress. At the top I painted this watercolour:

Green field with sheep

Siena by night

An iconic view of the cathedral of the Tuscan hill-town of Siena. I did this well after dark, sitting adjacent to the barn-like church of San Domenico.

The glory of Siena is its uniform red-brick, all but unchanged from the 13th and fourteenth centuries. The visual immersion of such an urban environment, in which walls, roads, paths, and houses are all the same organic hue, is completely alien to the North American city experience, with its grey geometries of concrete and asphalt.

Not that any of that is visible in a night picture, of course. But the ordered chaos that carries Siena over its three hills is apparent. Almost every floor is at the level of someone else's roof.

Apres Hiroshige

Of late the British Museum has been in the habit of getting Julian Opie to curate shows of Japanese prints. Dream job, in my opinion. I hope they keep doing it.

In 2007 Opie selected a whole range of Hiroshige prints, including the late triptychs. Tarragon and I saw them that winter, and a little bit later Tarragon made this oil sketch based on one of them.

Specifically, the view of Shisaku, Iki Province, from the series Famous Views of the Sixty-Odd Provinces.

It's a nice painting, but I find it a bit jarring to see a Hiroshige view without that rich and characteristic blue that is so common in his landscapes. I suppose the cooler blue in Tarragon's painting suits the snowy scene.

Blustery Day

Tarragon's oil sketch of a farm in the lee of the Hog's Back. It's in the vicinity of Compton again, like so many of his landscapes.