The Beautiful City

 

Today is the second-to-last day of my Back to School Sale on eBay and Etsy, and it just happens to include select wearable art pieces featuring my painting, Beautiful City. I painted Beautiful City in 1996. It took until 1997 to actually finish it. It's an oil painting that started as a composition exercise assigned by the late, great Paul Hartley, an amazing artist and professor at ECU. New artists are famously bad at using color properly. Composition is an important element that tends to get thrown out the window when an artist starts using color. So we were told to create a composition using only color, no images. Once we had achieved a solid composition with the colors, we were allowed to superimpose an image over the underlying form. I had just returned from a summer internship in Italy so I chose Italian scenes as my subject. I was heavily influenced by Hartley and similar artists to add hidden images to my work, so this is a dual painting. If you look at it right side up you see scenes from Firenze (Florence) and if you turn it upside down you see scenes from Venezia (Venice). Thus the name, Beautiful City, or La Bella Cittá in Italian. Although the mother and child is front and center, if you look carefully you will see it is just a small part of the subject matter. My Madonna is modeled after the fresco at the entrance to my street in Firenze, but you see this theme throughout Italy. Pretty much every street has its own saint, the Madonna being the most popular by far, and people leave offerings to them every day. I wanted to capture the intense light, saturated color, and typical sights of Italy and I was, and am pleased with this work. You can find the entire collection of wearable art and home goods in my Le Galeriste shop, but a few are available and discounted through 8/23 in my Etsy shop as well. Link to all my shops from ateliermandaline.com.