Constantly Looking in Napoli

You might be walking on a main boulevard in Naples, and constantly looking into every little side alleyway that you pass because that's where all the people are coming from or going, and there's so much noise and activity there in those narrow lanes.  Banners are hanging.  Signboards are all over the place.  All kinds of stuff is for sale.  This drawing is an 8x10 pen and ink, with ink wash, and pastel.

Napoli Painting

A Napoli painting showing a narrow street shared by vehicles and people: a 12x12 oil on panel.

Napoli 10

The tenth drawing in the Napoli series: a 9x12 pen and ink, ink wash, with pastel on bristol paper.

Colorful Side Street

Colorful Napoli side street.  8x10 pen and ink, ink wash, and pastel on bristol paper.

Napoli Beckons

Napoli beckons: an 8x10 view down an alley with car windshields reflecting the sky that is several stories above and not visible.  Pen and ink, ink wash, and pastel on bristol paper.

Napoli Jumble

A Napoli drawing depicting the jumble in an alleyway: 8x10 pen and ink, ink wash, with pastel on bristol paper.

Time Will Tell

Somebody told me that they didn't think they could respond as well to my Napoli drawings as with some of my other work, until they looked at them.  Yes, they are about Napoli the city, but to me they also are a means to experiment.  I start them in different ways, never sure where to begin and where to end.  I already sense an insight I didn't have before about painting.  Time will tell.  This one is 8x10 inches, done with pen and ink, ink wash, and pastel, not necessarily in that order.

Urban Aisle

This image of a Napoli street kept reminding me of the painting once called an "explosion in a shingle factory" but instead of a nude descending a staircase, a few people are walking up a narrow urban aisle.  It's 12x9 inches, pen and ink, ink wash, and pastel on bristol paper.

New and Old

An 8x10 Napoli drawing of old and new: venerable buildings and people on their iphones.

Napoli Intensity

In this drawing I tried to capture the intensity of walking up or down the narrow streets of Napoli.  These streets are often too small for cars, though that doesn't stop some drivers from trying to get through, but motorbikes are everywhere, so one has to be alert.  If you are alert, there is so much to see.   Of course, people are everywhere too.  8x10 ink, ink wash, and pastel.

Another Napoli Drawing

This drawing captures what walking the streets of Napoli is like.  Neapolitans prefer to hang out their wet laundry from balconies and windows, which explains why the buildings are so high with windows and balconies.  The narrow streets are apparently based upon the original Greek layout, and fortunately, the Neapolitans do not believe in replacing old buildings with new ones.  The result is an intense, visually exciting city.  This drawing is 9x12 with ink, ink wash, and touches of pastel.

Napoli Drawing

A 10x8 drawing, made of ink, ink wash and touches of pastel, of a narrow street in Napoli, Italy.  I was told not to use the word Naples, but Napoli instead.  In Napoli, the streets are narrow and the buildings high, creating canyons of light and shadow filled with people and hanging laundry.  I plan on doing a series of drawings to ease my way into painting, which I haven't done for a couple weeks.

A Street in Naples

12x12 oil.

Closer

A 9x12 view of a Naples street, closer to what I am looking for.

Neapolitan Mal Content

12x16 oil of Rua Catalana (the lower street) at Via Medina in Naples.   I am not sure that this picture is what I want yet...It may undergo revision.

Arnheim writes, "The Pointillists displayed the Newtonian revelation that neutral gray comes about as the union of various colors.  Although the effect of a straight gray does not vary all that much from the additive mixture of multicolored dots, it makes all the difference for the meaning of the pictorial statement that the drab tranquillity of standard existence is revealed as an accumulation of all the riches."

Ornate Column and Dumpster in Naples with a Definition of Painting

Another 9x12 drawing of a street scene in Naples.   I also made more progress on the painting I started yesterday.

In the Lucien Freud: paintings exhibition catalog Robert Hughes offers a moving definition of painting:

"Painting is a sublime instrument of dissatisfaction, of dissent from any kind of visual orthodoxy and received idea, not excluding those of late modernist mannerism.  No work of art can ever be experienced at first hand by as many people as a network news broadcast or the commercials that grout it.  That does not matter. It never has.  What does count is the energy and persistence with which painting can embrace not 'empty value' but lived experience of the world; give that experience stable form, measure and structure; and so release it, transformed, into one mind at a time, viewer by viewer, so that it can work as (among other things) a critique of the more 'ideological' and generalized claims of mass media.  There is no great work of art, abstract or figurative (and especially none figurative) without an empirical core, a sense that the mind is working on raw material that exists in the world at large, in some degree beyond mere invention.  Painting is, one might say, exactly what mass visual media is not: a way of specific engagement, not of general seduction.  That is its continuing relevance to us.  Everywhere, and at all times, there is a world to be re-formed by the darting subtlety and persistent slowness of the painter's eye.  We are never loose from our bodies and the re-embodiment of our experience of that world -- its delivery from the merely conceptual, the unfelt, the second-hand or the rhetorically transcendent -- is what painting offers."

Naples 4

I did start a painting, but have another 9x12 drawing for now.  This location is the corner of Via Sanfelice and Via Medina.  I hope I am conveying the sense of non-stop activity that typifies Naples.

Another Naples

Another 9x12 charcoal drawing of a street scene in Naples.

Napoli

Exploring a new urban subject, the city of Naples, Italy, I am starting off with drawings.  There will be other non-urban images as well to come.   Oil and pastel paintings soon.  Both of these are 9x12.