Zocca Blair Pessemier Acrylic/canvas 8 x 20" 20 x 50cm
Laurie Fox Pessemier Acrylic/newspaper 16 x 23" 41 x 59cm
Milan Cathedral Blair Pessemier Acrylic/canvas 20 x 24" 50 x 60cm
Laurie Fox Pessemier Acrylic/newspaper 16 x 23" 41 x 59cm
Laurie Fox Pessemier Acrylic/newspaper 16 x 23" 41 x 59cm
Laurie Fox Pessemier Acrylic/newspaper 16 x 23" 41 x 59cm
Laurie Fox Pessemier Acrylic/newspaper 16 x 23" 41 x 59cm
Laurie Fox Pessemier Acrylic/newspaper 16 x 23" 41 x 59cm
Laurie Fox Pessemier Acrylic/newspaper 16 x 23" 41 x 59cm
Laurie Fox Pessemier Acrylic/newspaper 16 x 23" 41 x 59cm
My paintings and my brain are all over the place this
week. We’ve been manning our own gallery
in Zocca for the Chestnut Festival, driving back and forth some 5 miles or so
on Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday.
The days of the week without the festival have been better for us: competing with the stuffed Santa Clauses and
Audrey Hepburn prints is just baffling.
Is it the public that demands that? Or what? On Tuesday, the market day, people stop in to
visit.
Having people stop in and talk about art and what it
inspires has been marvelous. Sales have
been slow. The thing is one never knows
how it will go until you try. Bigger
city venues are in order.
I had a big telephone visit with a French friend. We talk about how to keep our brains fresh
and alert. He tells me about Italian
Nobel-prize winning neurologist, Rita Levi Montalcini. She lived to be 103, working, learning,
thinking every day, which gave her longevity.
We need to keep building those synapses in our brain. My friend cautioned me to look at
alternatives to painting: “you could be
like Monet, who lost his sight, or Renoir who had arthritis.” I love that someone would put me in that
sentence, growing old among the artistic giants.
The days are getting shorter, and we’re sleeping in until 7. Harika doesn’t want to go out until it gets
light. We manage to eat our lunch in the
back yard most days. Fabbio brings me a
pile of grapes he holds in his shirt and tips onto the table. They are picking apples from the tree.
I take the prickly chestnuts in hand to paint, in keeping
with the festival.
