As Venice sleeps

As Venice Sleeps   acrylic on paper 17x27cm ©2012 Lisa Le Quelenec

I had forgotten, I hadn't posted this painting that was completed just before my visitors arrived. This was the last painting that I will do of Venice for a while. Duty calls and I am returning to the beach as exhibitions are fast approaching. I really enjoyed the change of location even if the themes running through are similar. I always shy away from buildings and architecture so it was a challenge for me to find a way of representing them without going into too much detail. Do you think it works?

Waiting II

Waiting II acrylic on paper 16x26cm ©2012 Lisa Le Quelenec

I finished the partner to my previous posts painting over the weekend. Both are now double mounted in a textured white board and available in my Etsy gallery  here .  In the coming months I think there will be more Venetian paintings. I see these as a continuation of the themes in my work - light on water, spatial and quiet contemplative depth - just maybe a new arm.


An artist whose work I admire who often talks of working from memory is Loriann Signori. Her latest post here on working in a series very eloquently and succinctly describes the power of producing a body of work in this way. You can see very clearly from her new  website  the themes and relationships running through her work.

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.