Roma Antica.  

When I first arrived in Rome I could not even look at the Roman Forum. It was too chaotic, like being in a museum with thousands of things, or a medieval chapel with too many patterns. I was trying to paint hidden beauty. "Why don’t you do a watercolor of the Colosseum?" suggested the Romans. I did not paint any landscapes that first year, just looked, and painted people, statues, façades. Then I began with very quick undetailed views. I would choose a single tree, or a back-lit scene, to simplify Rome down to the paintable: a puddle of sepia watercolor with scratchy silhouetted tree trunks, the graceful repeating domes of the skyline. With time, in crept the Roman sun, down the length of the trunks of the parasol pines, defining one isolated column, then another. The pictures grew more complicated. As I learned to look and paint slowly, with patience, this marvelous city began to unfurl before my eyes. 

The trees and arches seem to have multiplied, to call out to be painted. They appear to me as watercolor, the dark, frothy mass of the treetops dissipating into the white paper sky, setting off the regal pallor of finely detailed columns. I paint the shadows, blending in towards the light:  local color differences disappear, unified by the sun. I like to use a thick brush for small preparatory sketches, to keep the image blocky and general, and then lose myself in the detail of larger pictures. The skies are scant pigment flowing across a wet page, the shadows broad strokes of wash with thicker dark accents, the sliver of light is left by a brushstroke bumping along the slightly rough surface of the soft paper. The more the marks have a beauty of their own, abstractly, the better the result is.

It is often necessary for me to paint things over and over, until there is the right combination of freshness and detail. I have come to relish the stacked-up views that are almost impossible to focus on, the harmony and discord of those endless holes at the beehive-like Trajan’s Forum, the rhythmic arcade of the Theatre of Marcellus, the jumble of the Roman Forum. 

A parasol pine punctuates the hill on the Palatino, pops out where the buildings divide as you go by. All the arches line up and then, Bing! Out comes the parasol pine, arched too.  The more I paint, the more beautiful Rome becomes.