Friday, September 30, 2022

Basilica of Santa Maria Assunta, With Swans (Torcello)

29 September 2019

The qualities of the colors in this image (to the extent that they can even be suggested by a photo, which can serve, after all and at best, only as an analogy of the actual scene--as even the finest recording of music offers but a kind of "parallel" and reductive version of actual living music), the chalky or almost pastel look of them as they appear in the autumnal late-afternoon marine light of the lagoon, is one of the things I miss most about Venice. As the old Venetian painters well knew, it's an atmosphere in which color takes precedence, seems more substantial than form, and the interplay of tones is everything. Let the Tuscans worry about drawing, about delineating forms in space and mathematical perspective--in the lagoon it's all a wash.  

 

Sunday, September 4, 2022

Head Over Heels in the South Lagoon

Vegetation grows thick on the islands of the south lagoon, and there's no telling what might be covered, or nearly covered by it: in this case a trampoline, in this re-discovered image I forgot ever taking (16 April 2017)