To the regular readers of Painting Perceptions… Apologies for the long absence of new posts on this blog. I’m back from Civita Castellana, Italy where I was painting at the JSS Italy Summer Program for the past month. I am currently working on an article about my experience there as well as talking to some other painters, students, teachers and others about their experience and to show work and photos. I also will look at the school’s plans for future sessions in Civita Castellana. I should have this ready soon, likely in a couple of weeks.
In the meantime, later today I plan to post a recent interview I had with Harold Reddicliffe that is a terrific read and have several more stellar painters lined up for future interviews.
Painting Perceptions was started in 2009 by Larry Groff to promote the ideas, practice and experience of painters working from observation in a modernist vein from around the world through interviews, essays, videos and community. It later evolved to include imagination-based and abstract painting as well.
Dear Larry,
Look forward to your essay on the Civita experience, and the rigors of those amazing gorges (and I don’t mean just the ice-cream we were scoffing).
I am still digesting the import of the experience, having lasted till the final few days, the six weeks . What I’ve learned will take a long time to adequately process and whatever the resistance to the theory in my own slow processing, I doubt I’ll ever look at anything in quite the same way again. Even the floral arrangements in the Relais Hotel were beginning to assume the sculptural force of Morandis, by the end of that summer. Hershberg is a unique force, not only as a painter but as a teacher and I felt tremendous respect for The Jerusalem School painters and the school’s ethos and whatever my own regressions to what Israel would call ‘technique’, along the way, and hiding in bushes from any critical gaze, I am now in the weather down here and going more deeply into grey, in the Australian light. It was a tremendous experience and this website of yours an invaluable commune.
Robyn Gardner
Wishart Gallery