Waiting

Waiting   acrylic on paper 16x26cm ©2012 Lisa Le Quelenec

This seems a very apt title for this painting. Let me explain.... I visited Venice for five days in 2008. I'd wanted to go for years and was so excited that I spent weeks putting together a sketching kit whittling it down to the essentials then adding more in to the pack then whittling it down again. I bought a new memory card for my camera just in case I ran out of room on the one I had. I had a new sketchbook, new paint, I was so excited counting down the days.

Once there it was everything and more than I expected. In fact it was so 'more' than I expected that I was completely overwhelmed and visually overloaded. I managed a few very poor sketches and took a few hundred photos and did very little else other than trying to absorb as much of what I was seeing as I could. As a holiday it was amazing and I would recommend to everyone to take the time to visit. I would love to visit again and am sure that one day I will. 

At home I tried and tried to paint the Venice that I had seen but in hindsight it was just too fresh in my memory. Whatever I tried came out too literal and didn't express any of the thoughts, feelings or experience. They didn't cut the muster as paintings for me and I felt very frustrated. With a subject that has been painted so many times by so many artists it is difficult sometimes to to paint without emulating someone elses vision resulting in a poor pastiche.

It has been just lately that I feel like I can paint the Venice that I felt and my over riding visual memory of the place; the evening walks, the hustle and bustle slowing down for the day and the softening of the colours and edges of the silhouettes of buildings, bridges and gondolas. The distance of time has filtered out the visual clutter and white noise distilling and refining the experience. It's the distillation that seems to become more and more important to my work.