Art on the Fly- Thoughts on being an Art Adventurer

I'm off on another adventure!  Once again I'll be trying to make art on the road...or in this case, on the fly.  I've just arrived in Greece after an overnight flight.  I'm sitting in the cafe' enjoying a few minutes of free WiFi and a cappuccino.  I'm again reminded of how great a cup of cappuccino can taste!  Europeans have got the formula, or perhaps the right machines for great coffee.  I'm feeling pretty rested despite light sleep on the plane.

I had almost an entire day to kill prior to meeting my group in Athens at the Aegean Airlines counter.  I'm thinking I may use today as a time to do some drawing and perhaps just try to capture quick sketches here at the airport.  There are a lot of interesting faces here...

I've decided to not expect myself to create a lot of finished work while here.  I am going to try to capture moments through sketches and quick studies.  I hope loosening up will allow me to be more free and less inhibited.  That pressure to do "great things" can be stifling, and I had a bit of that feeling on my last trip.

Waiting to begin until you can do something great is a sure way to never get anywhere...

Those of us with perfectionist instincts can fall prey to that kind of trap if we're not careful.  When I first began doing art, I wouldn't start a painting until I knew where I was going to hang it!  How silly that seems now, but I'm sure someone out there can relate.  Thankfully, I've moved past that kind of mindset, but every once in a while I have to fight for the right to just jump in and do something simply for the fun of it.

We all have to begin somewhere...

Those of us who come to art later in life have to sometimes be willing to set aside the sense of competence and accomplishment we have achieved in other realms of our life.  There's almost a need to surrender our egos to the process of exploring something new and very challenging.  If we are going to learn new things as adults, we have to be willing to play around and perhaps fail occasionally.  Ironically, I've found that some of my best work has resulted from just giving myself permission to play around and have fun.  When I have joy in the process it tends to show up in the painting.  As a result, I'm all about encouraging my students to HAVE FUN and paint what interests them.  It's a formula that has worked for me, and I'd predict it would work for you too.


You may or may not know about my recent trip to Tuscany May 2013.  While there, I painted and drew my way around Tuscany and Cinque Terre with an art group led by my friend and mentor, Karlyn Holman.  I had lots of fun, sketching here and there, and painting when possible.  I loved what I did, but didn't have a lot of "finished" work upon coming home.  Prior to leaving on this trip, I did some work on a few of those sketches and had fun bringing a few of them across the finish line.

Here are a few of the watercolors and paintings which have resulted from my adventure in Tuscany.


In the painting I call “Bubble Boys”  I tried to capture a sense of light from the left and use it to shine a spotlight on the main characters of the drama I was trying to create.  The scene was a quiet corner in Castellina.  The young boy and the old man were in a separate location in the same town.  I had been charmed by their interaction and took some photos of them.   Later, I decided to merge them as characters into my scene after I’d drawn the location as I’d found it.  The scene was originally without people.  After assessing the drawing, it felt lifeless and so I placed the exchange between these two into the scene.  The result is this painting.  

Sketch done on location with figures inserted later

Bubble Boys
Watercolor and Ink on Paper
11X15

The villa pictured in this scene was very near San Fedele.  By pure chance, I ended up perched atop a ruin of a celtic altar in order to capture the scene.  The whole experience was magical...on a Tuscan hillside by myself and in the midst of all this greenery.  This painting begs the question:  when is the painting complete?  Sometimes the answer is, “when I’ve said all I have to say on the subject”.  I’m not sure if this one is complete...I still am tempted to inject an image of the fawn that visited me at the end of my time there, but for now, this painting is at least a remembrance of my magical moment at Villa Casa Nova.

Villa Casa Nova, Chianti

 The rooftops of Siena were not altogether evident in walking around town, but after photographing my way through the city I found that some cropping and zooming allowed me to focus in on some of the abstract patterns found above the rooflines.  There is a lot going on above the street level as you can see...wires, dishes, balconies, terraces, antennae, and more.  It was fun to treat them as patterns and make that the focus of this painting.

Rooftops of Siena

I was able to gain permission from the photographer to paint this aerial view of Porto Venere in Cinque Terre pictured below.  We met while on a ferry boat shuttling between the towns which form the Cinque Terre.  She and her book of photographs were lovely.  In painting it, I used a bit of collage to create a sense of the texture in the hills.  What I was really going after was the sense of the dramatic setting for the church at the entrance to the harbor and the steep incline on these precipitous cliffs.  I think the perspective of the composition helps get my point across.  It’s incredible that people have lived their lives for so many centuries perched on the sides of these cliffs. I’m hoping this piece conveys  some of my sense of wonder at the beauty and the ruggedness of the area.

Birds Eye View- Porto Venere, Cinque Terre

Our home base in Tuscany was the restored former monastery of San Fedele.  Such a romantic place!  That was the intention of this painting...to capture the romance of the location there.  I decided to give the wrought iron fence some prominence and push the lighting to create a sense of warmth.  I hope these paintings give you an idea of how wonderful it can be to augment your travels by capturing your memories through photography, drawing  and painting. That's why I'm on another art oriented trip...I can't get enough!

San Fedele, Chianti

As for Tuscany, I can’t wait to go back!  Showing San Fedele and the Chianti area to friends and students who may want to join me is next on my bucket list!  Let me know if you’d like to be part of our adventure in Sept 2014!!!  Cost is $2695 per person and includes art and cooking lessons, double occupancy room, two meals per day and all transportation from the airport and around the area to local sites I feel l will be conducive to painting, drawing, and photography.   

Please contact me if you're interested and I'll fill you in on all the fun details!  rebecca@artmyrtlebeach.com

My Greek Adventure will continue for the next couple of weeks.  

Our First Stop:  the Island of Lesbos!  I can't wait to learn more and paint my way around this ancient and beautiful country!  Here's a taste of one of my first Greek photos...lots more to come!  Stay tuned...

Molyvos: on the Island of Lesbos, Greece

Rebecca Zdybel

Artist/ Art Instructor

Myrtle Beach, SC

I

Bathing in Holy Water- Heaven helps when everything goes to Hell

I spent my last day in the Cinque Terre on my own.  The Cinque Terre are 5 cities along the northwestern coast of Italy near Porto Venere.  Our group spent the first day on and off the ferry and shuttling between these inaccessible hill-towns along this coast.  On this final day, the rest of my group was ready to sit and paint in Porto Venere, which was the town we were staying in.  I had only seen 3 of the 5 cities and wanted to see them all, so I set out on my own and bought a ticket for the ferry again.  It was a beautiful day.  Just being on the boat and able to drink in all that visual beauty of this amazing coastline was a treat.

Europe measures time in such different increments.  We look at our history and measure it in terms of wars and perhaps 50 year increments.  Here, they literally go back thousands of years.  These cities are old.  They date back to times when there were no national governments.  It was every man for himself, and every village for themselves.  Pirates or Saracens would regularly raid along the coasts and so protection was gained by making it inconvenient or impossible to reach you.  Families moved up into the hills and began cultivating grapes and terracing the incredibly steep slopes in order to literally carve out a safe place to live.  When you look up and down the hills, you can get some sort of appreciation for how long people have been living in these hills.  Every possible square foot seems to have been altered by human labor.  Life here must have been incredibly difficult, but life has been going on here for a long, long time.  Just walking around is a struggle…and that is with paved roads and stairs to travel.  What must it have been like to live here without any of those?  It really makes the point that my life has been so easy by comparison. 

I got off the ferry in Manarolla and walked uphill, and uphill again, and UP some stairs to yet another hill.  By the time I got to the church at the top of another hill, I was ready to sit and paint. 

 I decided to go up even a little higher on a path that led to the terraced gardens above the village in order to get an aerial view of the church square and see the buildings’ roofs a bit better.  (I love all the roofs here…so full of great shapes). 

 I got out my water bottle, set it beside me, got out my little 3 legged stool and quickly found that it didn’t support me very well on an incline.  Since very little ground is flat in this place, I just propped myself up as best I could with my legs and hoped I could be fast with my drawing and painting.  Comfort is not necessarily part of painting plein air!  

Once I was done with my sketch it was time to paint.  I reached into my pack and pulled out my paints.  My palette had some paint which had oozed beyond the box and I did my best to clean it, and started painting.  I used a little watercolor, a little white acrylic ink, and was trying a scraping technique I was interested in using.  As I got going, a bit of red paint made its way onto the painting.  Where did that come from?  I looked at my hands and I had thick red paint all over my right hand! Oh no! Reaching for my water bottle, I knocked it over and it began to roll down the steep little path I was perched upon…  

I looked around and the closest public facility was the church.  I made my way up there and since it was at the top of the village, very few people were around.  I went inside and there was nobody in there.  These old churches have no bathrooms, but then I spied it… and it was like a choir of angels began to sing… the holy water fount!  A beautiful marble fount with a small plastic container of holy water in it!  Hear the angels yet?  I certainly did, and yet the good catholic girl in me hesitated for a minute…well at least for a moment (I was never really that good).   

I certainly couldn’t bathe in the fount, but who was I to say that God hadn’t provided this perfect provision for me in my time of need? Who was I to not take advantage of what God was providing…Right?  I looked left…looked right…and dove into my pack for some paper towels.  Dipping them into the holy water I was able to rinse the red color off my hands without staining the holy water. It took quite a few dips to get clean, but eventually I looked a little less like an axe murderer.  What a relief!

Then I remembered that I had acrylic on my brush…and those of you who paint know you can’t leave acrylic on your brushes…right?  So again, I looked left…looked right…and picked up the plastic container and carefully poured a little water into a collapsible bottle I had with me.  I spilled a bit in the transfer from container to container, but it was captured by the marble fount (that’s what it was made for, to hold holy water, right?) Still hearing the angels?  I was!  When my covert operations were over, I felt clean and relieved that my brush wouldn’t be ruined.  I may have to mention it next time I go to confession, but I was happy!

I made my way down the hill, bought some water, and boarded the ferry for the last city Monterosso.  This last city is flatter than most of them and has a beach.  I was ready to try again…this time on more level ground!  I found a cute wine shop and decided to sit in the shade and do a little sketch.  This experience went much better and I just loved capturing the umbrellas, the barrels and all the wine bottles and signs.  When my sketch was done, I had lost my shade and needed a little gelato, so the sketch never got painted, but it was a great ending to a fun day of trying to make art en plein air (which means outdoors on location). 

I’ve decided plein air painting is a little like camping…it may not always go well, but when you survive the misadventures you end up with great stories and some art which records the memories.  I can’t wait to do it again!






Can't wait for October 2015...join me on my Artfully Tasteful Tour of Tuscany!  See all the details here on my website or contact me for information.



Rebecca Zdybel
Artist, Instructor, Art-Travel Instructor
Art Lessons in all media
Myrtle Beach, SC
rebecca@artmyrtlebeach.com

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Rebecca Zdybel is an artist and instructor in Myrtle Beach, SC.  Follow her and see her work at http://www.artmyrtlebeach.com/

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