Italian Paintings/ Two Plums

These  two plums are from a little tree very near to the exact coordinates of the spot my father landed in Italy when he parachuted out of a plane just prior to its crashing into a lake in 1943.

I painted this on card stock. I was in a hurry to get it down and didn't have a smaller sheet, and I didn't have a natural boundary to relate to as I worked -- very uncomfortable! I should have drawn myself a square to work within, will know for next time. Here I have just cropped it with the camera.
Am still sneaking up on the landscape as subject, taking walks in the early morning and evening, trying to find the light conditions that are most compelling. You could die of beauty here in Italy.

Italian Painting/ Italian plums

Actually, it's not quite this red.... and the red is not uniform. Again, the camera.

I am out of reading material (AAAUGH!) so I am all over the internet reading people's essays and looking at painting, good, bad, student, pro -- tutto. I should have done this earlier....
Fascinating! some say, I hate line! I do everything to avoid it...Painting is not drawing. And then, I love line, it is another element to use in painting, part of the rich vocabulary. And so on, very entertaining. But what Sargent says has been tremendously helpful to me in the last few days: Painting is the arrangement of tones, he says.  That is a big statement and a clear one - In observational painting, color cannot be the king. It has to be value.

Tomorrow the first of a long line of visitors arrives and I must dismantle the studio and go outside to the landscape.....(so scary!) but I want to learn it, therefore, into the breach!

Italian Paintings/ Five Apricots

I had only an 8x6 panel to work on and wanted to do a string of the apricots, those that were not too badly decomposed. I like that format, the length twice the height. Although I tried not to get the forms half exactly in the middle, somehow they ended up there. I have cropped the second one here to be what I was wanting --  but I sort of like the big slab of yellow on the top one, and more air.
These apricots look all bloody because of camera  color distortion, no clue how to fix this.

Italian Paintings / Apricots

The apricots are in season here so there are mountains of them in the green grocers. My Italian family is making jam  from the trees on their farm, and they say there is a jar with my name on it.  The afternoons are hot now and the twilights very long, perfect for eating outside and just sitting still to watch the light.