Painting in Florence

I went to Florence expecting Renaissance beauty, serious painting and fabulous Italian food. I got all three, along with 100 degree heat, mysteriously stale bread, a crash course in improvised Italian and Spanish, and a month of painting boot camp that took me much further than I could have hoped.

I have been home from Florence for a little over a week, and I am still processing the experience. I suspect I will be for quite some time.

I went to Florence to live for a month and study portrait painting at the Charles H. Cecil Studios. I did not go as a tourist, and that makes for a very different experience of a city.

You have an apartment. You buy groceries. You walk the same streets every morning and see the same people. You find your coffee shop.

I also took it as a personal mission to get the baristas at my regular coffee shop to be pleasant to me. By the end of the month I had won over three out of four, which I consider a respectable result.

My Italian was another matter.

I butchered it regularly, sometimes producing a language that was part Italian, part Spanish, and part whatever came into my head at the moment. Some people thought it was funny. Some seemed to find it interesting. Others were decidedly less receptive.

Living somewhere, rather than visiting it, gives you an interesting perspective on culture. I came away with quite a few observations on that subject. I may share them. I may not. It is still early days.

For most of the month, however, Florence was about two things.

Painting and thinking about painting.

I went to the studio for a very particular reason. I wanted to learn from a tradition of painters who had learned from painters before them, who had learned from painters before them. It was that passing down of knowledge, and its connection to the portrait painters I have admired for years, particularly John Singer Sargent, that drew me there.

The experience was not exactly what I had anticipated.

I found myself learning further down that road of mentors than I had expected. But I also realized that after a lifetime of drawing and decades of making art, I knew what I had come looking for. I knew enough to recognize it when I saw it, to ask the questions I needed to ask, and to take from the experience what I had gone there to find.

That, in itself, turned out to be part of the education.

I have drawn portraits all my life. I love trying to capture the spirit of a person, and I take enormous pride in creating something from scratch that actually looks like them. A millimeter can change a face. Move something ever so slightly and suddenly it is no longer that person.

At the same time, a painting has to remain a painting. It cannot simply become a photograph.

That juxtaposition fascinates me. I think portraiture may be one of the most difficult challenges there is in painting, which is probably exactly why I love it. I am all about a challenge.

This was the reason I embarked on the trip in the first place. I want to begin a portrait and figure series, and I wanted the training to take me there.

What I did not entirely anticipate was painting boot camp.

Florence was sweltering. We were painting through days in the 90s and sometimes around 100 degrees. At various points I had what seemed like four separate streams of sweat running from the top of my head down both sides of my face while I was trying to study the precise placement of an eye.

Very glamorous.

I was propelled into a growth experience that went well beyond learning to paint a portrait. Pushing through the physical challenge of working and learning in those conditions showed me something about my own determination and just how much I love painting.

Oil painting, quite simply, is a dream come true for me.

I painted in watercolor for decades before seriously moving into oils, and I now realize what an extraordinary foundation watercolor gave me. Color has never frightened me. I do not struggle with muddy mixtures. I understand what happens when colors meet because watercolor taught me that lesson over and over again.

Dare I say it, I am in heaven with oils as my medium. 

Peter came to Florence for ten days, about a week into my stay, and his arrival changed the rhythm of things for me. He took care of so much of the daily grind. He stocked water and electrolytes, made sure I had things in the refrigerator, walked me to the studio, and generally took care of the practical things that had become surprisingly exhausting in the heat. It gave me the space to concentrate on what I had come to Florence to do, which was paint.

It also meant I could finally relax a little and enjoy Florence outside the studio. We saw the Duomo, went to restaurants, wandered, and enjoyed the city together.

There is such a joy in sharing my life with someone who genuinely wants to share it with me. Having Peter there reminded me of that. He did not take me away from the experience I had gone to Florence for. He stepped into it with me.

As for Italian food, I have to be slightly contrary here.

I had some of the best food I have ever eaten. I also had some that was, well, not.

We are very spoiled at home by the enormous variety of food available to us. I have been cooking since I was nine and it is another great passion of mine, so perhaps I am a difficult audience.

I did come home with two treasures. One is a fabulous lasagna recipe, which I promise I will share. The other is vongole in a white wine sauce over long pasta. Those two are coming home with me permanently.

The bread remains a mystery.

It seemed oddly stale every single day for a month. Perhaps that is intentional. Better for absorbing olive oil? I am still investigating.

I can, however, offer one unequivocal piece of advice to anyone contemplating Florence in the summer.

Bring fans.

Bring a handheld fan. Bring one that hangs around your neck. Bring one for wherever you are staying. If you are renting an apartment, do not assume the words “air conditioning” will mean quite what you think they mean.

Consider yourself warned.

There was something fascinating about living inside Florence itself. It can feel like a city still occupying another time. The streets and buildings inside the historic center hold you in that world, and then you pass through one of the old gates or remnants of the city and modern life appears again.

For a painter, it is an extraordinary place to disappear into for a while.

And somehow, while I went there expecting to move forward, I also went backward.

In the best possible way.

As a very young artist, I discovered that if I held my work up to a mirror, I could immediately see what was wrong with it. The eye becomes accustomed to its own mistakes. Reverse the image and suddenly you can see again.

At Charles Cecil, the mirror is an integral part of the sight size method. You are constantly refreshing your eye. You are looking for relationships, large blocks of tone, proportion, and gesture before becoming consumed by details.

There I was, thousands of miles from home, being formally introduced again to principles that in some ways brought me back to the way I instinctively drew and painted when I was young.

That surprised me.

Florence has jet fueled me forward in my painting journey, but at the same time it has brought me back to myself.

I completed four portraits while I was there. Some of you may already have seen them in my recent Instagram posts, where I shared photographs from the studio showing my paintings alongside the models.

The paintings themselves are still in Florence, preparing, I presume, for their eventual journey to Ohio.

When I went to arrange the shipping, the woman at the shipping store casually informed me that they were closing for the month of August because she was going on vacation.

That was apparently the end of the conversation.

So my paintings are having a longer Italian stay than I did.

They should arrive sometime in September.

I could not have written a more appropriate final chapter to my month in Italy if I had tried.

Now I am home and I cannot wait to work.

I am beginning my portrait and figure series. I will also be working in charcoal again. I want to explore gesture, large passages of tone, drawing, and the human figure, while continuing to paint the subjects that have already become part of my work.

I did not come home wanting to paint like someone else.

I came home wanting to paint more like myself.

There is an enormous amount I want to paint, and that excites me more than ever. Florence opened up possibilities I have been moving toward for a very long time.

It feels nice to become me again.

All the rooms in my world are lit now.

From my studio to your home,

Diane