Sunday, October 15, 2017

Artnotes: Big and Small

 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
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.

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