oil on canvas 2015
70 x 50 cm
Waking up before sunrise lets you see the city in a totally different way. Apart from the obvious contrast between activities done at night and those done during the day, there is something extremely magical in the dark morning that makes you feel that the world is under water. In Italian, you would say ‘ovattato’ but the meaning of this word, which is ‘padded’ or ‘cocoon-like’, doesn’t take into account that some things are ‘muffled’ but others are actually amplified.
Even though you can’t see well, you can hear your footsteps when you walk or a bird singing in the distance and a passing car as if it were an airplane. You can’t immediately see the form or shape of the building in the distance but the moon seems too bright to look at directly sometimes. People pass you furtively and the clamour of moving trucks pervades while the rest of the world sleeps.
Painting outdoors is about light but more specifically, I would say energy. There is an energy that comes from the sun. Every living thing reflects light in some way when it approaches and equally when it leaves. Inanimate objects catch this energy and is visible to us through our senses. The energy contained in light is received by way of the eyes but the effect of that energy is felt in our entire soul.
When I paint, I am trying to capture that energy through colours. The spectator can receive a similar energy that I am trying to capture when I paint. Something of this process happens with every type of painting whether realistic or abstract: it is intrinsic in the material of the colour that can be measured in frequencies. But when the colours are fashioned after a real sensorial ‘experience’ in the light, as it is when you paint en plein air, the effect is stronger and closer to the truth.
[whohit]-The Rose Bridge_EN-[/whohit]
