A Hill Town In Italy

 Architecture is a complex enough puzzle when it's looked at straight on, but that complexity increases when you are looking down a hill or along a street. This explains why those views are the most interesting to look at. Capturing that complexity as simply as possible is the trick. Using fewer colors is a start.

Roma

When it's cold and gray here in Minneapolis it sometimes helps to spend a little time drawing a warmer, sunnier place. Somewhere I've been, in this case Rome, my favorite neighborhood of the old city between Piazza Navona and the Pantheon. I can almost smell the motorino fumes.

Toscano

A drawing from my Italian sketchbook of a few years ago.

Hard Choices

There was a time when our hardest choice was whether to spend more time in Florence or Venice on a trip to Italy. It's easier to show this in an illustration than a photograph. Photo reality makes this kind of metaphysical comparison seem implausible, but this is exactly how close Venice and Florence are inside our heads. (That is Florence on the left.)

Gourmet Took Us To Italy For Lunch

Not literally, of course. But that is the beauty of a food magazine. The pleasure (some of it anyway) without the calories or the expense. Or, for that matter, the effort of cooking. I can't remember the article this illustrated, but I do remember not being sent to Pisa to work up sketches. Photographers are always being flown places and housed and fed. My schedule is more relaxing and my overhead is less onerous, but I doubt photographers envy me much. After working for Gourmet for many years I began to get calls from Bon Appetit, which was nice because the look at Gourmet was shifting away from illustration and Bon Appetit was very hip and West Coast. Both were published by Condé Nast, so I didn't worry about a conflict. Then I got a call from my person at Bon App, shocked and hurt that I'd done an illustration for Gourmet. Which reminds me of an anecdote about Anais Nin. In her fifties she had husbands on both coasts, who didn't know about each other. Life is full of innocent complications.

Della Francesca

This dot series I painted for gallery sale also got into American Illustration, but it never caught on in everyday illustration assignments. Why? I suppose it's process. I paint the dots, then I paint the iconography freehand. It's hard to run that through a sketch approval process. These I painted by taking small details from paintings by Piero Della Francesca. I was recently back from Italy and still agog over everything Italian. One use I've gotten out of this dot style: the cover of my book. (See right.) The gallery that sold my paintings recently closed. I'm looking for a new one.