This is one of several posts describing my painting experiences on a November 2015 trip to Italy's Cinque Terre region and also the Tuscany region.We arrived at our Monterroso rental villa late at night, after a 2 1/2 hour drive from the Florence Airport, quite tired from the long flights and airport waits for connecting flights from upstate New York to Washington DC Dulles Airport, then to Brussels and finally to Florence. The next day we drove down to the commercial section of Monterosso, parked (2 euro per hour) and walked the town to find groceries and look for a store to purchase mineral spirits for cleaning my paint brushes before I could use my fast drying alkyd oils (no luck). The next morning I did a watercolor of our rental house and it's beautiful garden. While painting, a helicopter arrived overhead and eventually landed on the hillside of the adjacent property. We thought perhaps a well off vacationer or resident was arriving first class. Shortly afterwards the helicopter started transporting large sacks of olives to another section of the property-perhaps to a olive oil press. This continued for an hour or more with electric power lines not to far from the drop spot. My painting of our rental and a picture of the helicopter are below.
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| Transporting Olive Sacks |
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Monterosso Cinque Terre Villa
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After my painting, we were following a lead to a store that might have the mineral spirits. It was farther walk than we had taken the day before as we did not realize that there was a lot more of Monterroso further up the main walk along the waterfront. We found the store near the church as we were told, however their solvents were not what I needed. We did some more exploratory walking and when heading back to the train station we passed under the bridge for the railroad tracks, There was an watercolor artist seated on a bench painting away, with some of his work taped to the bridge wall and displayed in a collapsible display rack. I showed him my note in Italian and English for mineral spirits and asked where to buy it. He spoke very good english and is from Croatia. He said he had a can of odorless mineral spirits that he had no need for and would bring it tomorrow at 1 pm, his normal time for arriving at his painting spot. We were there the next day at 1 but he had forgot it. He asked where we might be having dinner that night and said he would bring it then. Our planned dinner spot was just about 50 meters from his painting spot. He happened along at 7 pm just as we arrived at the restaurant. Turns out he would carry a portfolio of paintings and enter the restaurants to ask the dinners if they would like to see some paintings. He told us he worked a 17 hour day, sketching the painting(s) on paper in the morning at his rental that he would paint under the bridge from 1 pm to 6 pm. He spent March to early November in the Cinque Terre towns before returning to Croatia.
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| Croatian Artist in Cinque Terre |
The next morning with mineral spirits in hand, we returned to Riomaggiore, the last of the 5 towns (most distant from Monterroso) which we had scouted out the previous afternoon. I had liked the harbour as a painting subject and felt that after I painted there we could then explore another town for the next day's subject. Below is my painting, "Harbor at Riomaggiore". To purchase prints cards, and other items with my painting images see my website www.robert-p-hedden.artistwebsites.com
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| Harbor at Riomaggiore |
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