Santa Maria della Salute

Moored boats in Cannaregio

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the tower

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

The isle of the dead in the Venetian lagoon

I took a seat on the north-east edge of Venice and made this post-card sized sketch of the city's cemetery island. Relatively recent by Venetian standards, the cemetery was founded adjacent to the old abbey of San Michele, which gave the island its name.

the beacon

At night in Venice, I saw a red light glimmering over the canal, and stopped to make a watercolour.

Worth mentioning: it's not easy to paint in the dark.

Santa Maria di Salute, Venice

A view across the quay and the loitering gondolas at the vast baroque church of Salute. It's the kind of view that's been done a thousand times but remains irresistible.

It's an etching, about 4" by 6," printed at the Open Studio in Toronto, Ontario. The uniform blue was applied with a technique called chine collé, in which a layer of tissue-thin tinted paper is laid down between the etching plate and the support paper.

Venice - the gondolas on the Riva degli Schiavoni

It was a cool November evening when I sat down on the embankment to make this picture.

I was in a hurry. The shapes were quickly sketched in with a black crayon, and then rounded out with watercolour. Although I started with lines - as I almost always do - the picture quickly became about mass and pattern. The final touches were added in gouache; you can see its opaque layers where the blue covers of the gondolas are visible above the dock.

In the background, San Giorgio Maggiore was a box of shadows, except for its brilliant marble facade, which here merges with the air.

A black night in Venice

"Venice often makes one feel loneliness. It does not console and does not enlighten like Florence or Rome… And the water! The water strangely fetters and absorbs all thoughts, just as it absorbs all sounds here, and an extremely proofed silence lies upon one's heart."  -Pavel Muratov, The Images of Italy, 1911.

A small painting in gouache and watercolour, done by night in Venice. This picture highlights one of the great problems of on-site painting at night: not that you can't see your subject, since an atmospheric picture is the point, but that you can't see the colours on your palette.

Venice by night

Mikhail Vrubel found Venice boring. It was of interest "only for his palette." That was not my experience. Even at night, when your palette shrinks to greys and only a muddy simulacra of the daylight colours are visible, the city remains beautiful and ominous. It's a place to feel lonely in.

And to paint. Watercolour at night is not easy. I was alone, and wandering the sestiero di San Marco, but I had my paints and I had plenty of time.

How Vrubel, a painter at once romantic and nihilistic, could have rejected Venice, the most romantic and abnegatory of cities, is a mystery. Perhaps they were too much alike. Sometimes you have to be a little bit dull in order to appreciate the magical. Tolkien retired to the most tedious suburb imaginable. Perhaps magicians read only non-fiction.

basilica di Santa Maria e Donato

A drawing of the beautiful basilica of Santa Maria and San Donato, on the Isle of Murano in the lagoon of Venice.

I made the picture with a china marker and watercolour - two mediums that do not complement each other. The roughness of the china marker is a sharp contrast to the delicacy of tone possible with watercolours, although here I laid down the paint more garishly than usual.

Murano is a peripheral suburb of Venice that is chiefly famous for its glass. Other than glass studios, its principal attraction is this church, to which my sketch hardly does justice.

It's an old church, perhaps going back to the 7th century, although the structure is largely of the 11th century. The famous mosaic pavement within dates from 1140.

Also inside are the bones of a dragon slain by Saint Donatus. Dragons were apparently quite common in Italy in the late Roman period, but seem to have been largely exterminated by the saints of the 4th and 5th centuries. Certain heathens have attributed the bones behind the altar of this church to a pleistocene megafauna of some sort, but they have no poetry in their souls.

The Lagoon from Burano

It was a hot and calm day in Venice, and the limpid water seemed to rise out of the lagoon to thicken the atmosphere and obscure the view. Here is a view of the city, from the nearby island of Burano.

Two views of a bridge in Venice

A page from the small brown sketchbook I kept on my first visit to Venice.

It's the Ponte degli Scalzi, the first bridge over the Grand Canal encountered by visitors (such as myself) who arriving by train. The top sketch was done with a dip pen and india ink, the bottom with water soluble graphite and a white crayon.

2 views in Venice

A page from a small sketchbook I once carried in Venice. Above, the view down the canal from the entrance to the Guggenheim done with a marker; below, the Ponte dell'Academia, drawn in pencil.

San Giacomo in Paludo

dockside at Burano

A quick sketch done at Burano in the Venetian Lagoon. It was done with gouache and watercolour on mylar, which is not a combination I recommend. Mylar is barely water-absorbant, so the paint sits on the surface and shows a heavy texture. Also, the moisture tends to crinkle the mylar, which is visible here.

It's a nice boat, though.

A pale view of mountains

The distant vista of the Alps, glimpsed from a northern corner of the island of Murano in the Venetian Lagoon. It was a cold November day, and coming on to rain, but I could see the snow and the peaks on the far side of the gloomy weather. I had to paint something, no matter how quickly.

The shimmering and luscious colours of Venice. This sort of thing is so typical of any Venetian view, but it has to be to said that Venice is pretty much unique in the world. A fun place to sit around and paint pictures. A fun place to die of cholera too, but there's not enough of that in this picture.

Small craft in Venice

I saw this small watercraft while wandering around the island of Burano, in the Venetian Lagoon. Shipbuilding by hand is one of those once-great vernacular arts that is everywhere on the decline, but one still encounters an immense variety of small craft, each with a design specific to their context and locale. I find them enchanting.

Gondolas

Gondalas at rest.

I was hypnotized by the pattern of the stakes and the black craft. Painted on a warm November day in watercolour and gouache on the wharf-side steps outside Santa Maria della Salute.

The Canal of Giudecca

as seen from a window of the Doge's Palace.

It's an etching on zinc, printed on hand-coloured Japanese tissue on a support of rag-cotton European paper.