The Rome Art Program began the 1st of June and it got off to a terrific start. Our participants coming to Rome are from Australia, London, USA and they were joined by Italian participants living in Rome.

They began their week by having a big Roman feast in a local restaurant and the following day, painting in the greatest Piazza in Rome, Piazza Navona, where chariot races were held during Roman times. They've also painted at the Pantheon and made drawings at the Trevi Fountain and Bernini's Tritone fountain. All the participants have metro & bus passes and they're using them to get around the city fast, from site to site. On Thursday evening, their bus was stopped by thousands of carabinieri getting ready for a big parade, including horses. They had to get off the bus and walk through these immaculately dressed men, many on horseback. So they ended their journey on foot, to the British School at Rome to hear a young scholar giving a lecture on Pope Sextus V. The BSR is one of the Academies in Rome, where Prix de Rome artists live & work for 1-2 years. Carole Robb, the RAP artistic director is staying at the British School and she gave our participants a tour of the Academy. When the Australians saw the tennis court and the rose garden they said 'Very Raj '.

Peter Miller the RAP art historian, gave our participants a tour of the Philip Guston 'Roma' show that he curated at Museo Carlo Biliotti -38 paintings all based on Guston's experience of living in Rome in the 70's and never been seen as a group before.

Carole Robb

These to paintings are from Carole Robb's series on women and fountains. The majority of the paintings are inspired by the fountains in Rome and through Italy. While traveling to Italy Carole would work on many small paintings and drawings plein-air then she would take the works back to the studio and begin creating monumental works from them. If you are interested in learning more about the series you can either go to her website, via link to the right, or you can go to www.robertsteelegallery.com look her up on the artists page.

Works shown:

top

Empty Fountain

14 x 16"

oil on linen

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Painting 1

72 x 84"

oil on linen

Caravaggio v. Michelangelo

A great Caravaggio show will be up while the program is there at the Scuderie del Quirinale - 2.18.10-6.13.10. Amazingly they will be exhibiting 30 out of his 40 works.

There was an article last week in the New York Times laying out the premise that Caravaggio has surpassed Michelangelo in popularity. That people are find Caravaggio's life and work easier to respond to, the photographic elements compared to the mannerist. This is an interesting argument, Michelangelo, with his super-human figures and religious motifs has lost out to an artist who is the ultimate bad-boy and created paintings with street life beating through them. Michelangelo was the establishment, being employed by the Medici family in Florence and the Pope in Rome. Whereas Caravaggio, while being commissioned by some of the wealthiest clientele, still was constantly running from the police, getting into brawls, and chasing women/men. It is an interesting article that I find some merit in but it will be better to judge in person. Rome and Florence will provide the perfect opportunity to see both the Caravaggio show and Michelangelo's pieces.

"Corot to Monet"

There will be another major exhibition while our participants are in Rome, "Corot to Monet," the Museo del Vittoriano in Piazza Venezia will host the show from March 6 to June 29. A few of the Impressionist artist in the exhibition will be Corot, Monet, Sisley and Pissarro, some of the works displayed will be from their travels to Italy. On display are
some 150 works including paintings, works on paper and vintage photographs. It will be interesting to see if the change in setting will change our interpretation of the paintings.

Peter Miller, art historian, will arrange a private viewing of the Guston show he's curated in Rome, for our participants on the Rome program. It is a great chance to see the important transitional paintings of a great american artist.

The American Academy has invited our participants for a special tour of the Academy when they're in Rome on our program. On the way up to theAcademy there is the majestic fountain of the Acqua Paola, built in 1612 by Pope Paul V. The Academy occupies ten buildings and eleven acres of gardens atop the Janiculum, the highest hill within the walls of Rome. The gardens and views truly capture the imagination.

Mark Pulsford, faculty, worked on this drawing on-site at the Palatine in the Forum in Rome. This area was where the ancient Roman Civilization developed. One has to walk through the Forum, filled with it's immaculate history, and climb to the top Palatine hill to reach this amazing building. The hike is worth it because it also offer breath taking views of Rome and a marvelous one of the Colosseum.

This drawing Daniel, faculty, did once he arrived back from the program last year. The source material was from several drawings and pictures of different vistas of Rome. He also incorporates some of the visual elements that he experienced while visiting museums in Rome and walking around Pompeii. He learned a great number of the frescoes create a sense of theatre. Since many of rooms had few to no windows, keeps the residence cool, the frescoes added an element of space and theatrics. Here he added a stage and top beam to compress the image, creating a focus to the central image.

Daniel Abrams' experience in Pompeii

This sketch our faculty member, Daniel Abrams, completed while with the participants in Pompeii. He was amazed by the complexity of the structures and the breath-taking beauty of the surrounding mountains. The experience of being able to draw in Pompeii and see the immense amount of artwork including the Villa of Mysteries has had a profound affect on his artwork. Everywhere he went through-out the city he found different elements which he wanted to capture. This has led Daniel to create pieces which are inspired by pre-renaissance, single ground plane/multiple perspective, description of space instead of a modern single-perspective space. He is looking forward to taking future participants to Pompeii and discussing compelling elements of drawing.

One of the beautiful things about creating artwork in Rome is the ability to bring home all of the pieces to your studio and see what the pieces can develop into. Here is a piece that one of our participants created last year. One of the reason this piece catches my eye is the endless possibilities that it opens. It is a great study that can be taken into the studio and be used as information for many future paintings.

Fellini's "Roma"

Over the past two weeks, Jan 18-29, Carole Robb has been teaching a drawing marathon and she based the inspiration of the marathon on Fellini's Roma - a movie comprised of vignettes of Fellini's experience and feelings of Rome. The pieces the students composed varied greatly, one artist created pieces with a great feeling of a stage, similar to early Roman paintings. The space was condensed, with an Ensoresque handling of the paint, drawing at once from the still images of the film and the grittiness of Fellini's description.

Another was inspired by the oedipal connotations in the film and created a wonderful piece with a feeling of a mid-career Matisse - with the handling of fabric, a splash of Bonnard - a surprise when you least expect it, and dash of German Expressionism - figuration. The painting works amazing well, capturing the scene with inventiveness, and best of all the amount of gold she used works.

The struggle with this film many had is with its atonal nature. Fellini did an amazing job putting all of these vignettes together and having them hold together without the assistance of a plot. Two artist I thought did a great job handling this. One began, what I hope will become a series, several pieces overlaying heads. Editing out early ones and laying more on top. When viewing them from a distance one can imagine them being roman clouds -- a stair way to heaven. It will be interesting to see how she develops the pieces. The other artist handles it a bit more concretely, using the Colosseum and it arches as a means to tell different stories. She admits and desires push the piece further, but at the moment it is starting to remind me of the first segment of the film New York Stories.

It was a great idea for Carole to base the marathon on Fellini and from what I saw it assisted the artists to begin opening some doors.

The Rome Art Program is designed to inspire artists to expand their artistic vision through painting and drawing on the streets of Rome and Florence, and in the countryside of Umbria—expanding on the plein-air tradition of earlier generations of artists.

The program assists artists by providing the time and instruction, if desired, to see the city and nature in new and amazing ways. We will be painting and drawing from the buildings that Michelangelo and Raphael designed. We will see how the city interacts with the historical and modern elements and the limitless possibilities we have in communicating it in our pieces.

Throughout the program there will be trips to museums, field trips, and chances to go to galleries and attend lectures at the American and British Academies.

It will be a very intense and fun experience to be part of.