Italy
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Monte dei Paschi di Siena
Around about a decade ago, Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena was attracting more publicity than the bank probably wanted, mainly due to problems they were having at the time with bad loans and losses. This general view of the bank’s historic headquarters accompanied many of the press articles at the time, but in the…
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Murano Glass
The island of Murano is of course famous for producing stylish glassware, a lot of which seems to find its way into the tourist shops of nearby Venice. This particular vase was actually purchased on Burano, another island in the lagoon which is not geographically very far from Venice, but which is (to borrow Hardy’s…
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Murano – Canale San Donato
Venice is lovely, but quite intense. The nearby islands of Murano and Burano offer a respite of calm – both the building and the tourist density on these islands is noticeably lower than the slightly misnamed “Serenissima”. This painting is fairly faithful to the photo that I took during our visit to Murano, in that…
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Venice – Grand Canal
In my art group I have a reputation for drawing “a lot of detail”, or sometimes even of drawing “too much detail”! Often I think this criticism is justified, and I do try to limit the detail in most my artwork. Sometimes however I feel that the detail is justified, and I’m happy about every…
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Venice by Lamplight
There is an almost infinite choice of vistas and objects to sketch in Venice. Nevertheless originality is still rather difficult since almost every wannabe artist who has visited the place in the last few centuries has had a go! So here, without any claim to originality whatsoever, is one of my contributions. This scene is…
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San Gimignano
Not so long ago we went on a walking holiday in Tuscany, staying every night in a different hilltop town, one of which was San Gimignano. Each day was full of its own surprises and delights, but there was one thing that happened every day – our walk started downhill in the morning and ended…
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Shadows in Sienna
Sienna in the sunshine is also very full of dark shadows, which to me suggested the use of a very stark black and white effect, drawn here using a vector graphics package called Linearity Curve. The vector graphics technique creates straight and extremely sharp edges, which gives a rather striking effect. However, it must be…
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David’s Admirers
We all know that Florence is full of Renaissance art – and if we stop to think about it we also know that in consequence Florence is full of art-admiring tourists, their backpacks, their cameras and camera phones. So it seemed fitting to include, and indeed emphasise, these onlookers in a scene from the Galleria…
Doodling ... 