Flowers from Rome

As we all have, I’ve been listening to the news this past week. As I paint, I have on NPR and sometimes the BBC and am taking in the news on Black Lives Matter, and now to a lesser extent Covid-19. Here we are living in this moment that is going to be written into history as a major event and hopefully one that marks real change.

So I’m in my basement studio, painting flowers, and upstairs I’ve arranged paintings of flowers from the Campo de’Fiori in Rome from our trip there last November. We had hoped to visit again this November but that’s not possible and it seems foolish to spend time regretting that in light of this historical moment we’re currently inhabiting.

In the middle of the Campo is the cloaked statue of the scientist and humanist Giordano Bruno who was burned at the stake for heresy, for questioning the church’s view of the heavens. He gazes toward the Vatican. We were interacting with all this history in Rome in November 2019, and then at the end of our day we bought flowers and brought them back to the apartment on Via Giulia we’d rented for the month. We photographed the flowers and I sketched them in watercolour. When I look at the paintings I made from the flowers, I can’t help but feel all the layers of history of the place they’re from, though this probably doesn’t come through for anyone looking at them without knowing all this, which is perfectly fine.

I was first in Rome in 1984, and then in 1993 on our honeymoon. We returned in November of 2018 and then 2019. It’s a place that calls to both me and Shawna.

Even though we’ll not be going back this year, perhaps we will next year. We had the good fortune of going back and measuring ourselves, our lives, against this city which will still be there. Rome will still be Rome, which is a reassuring thought.

I painted these works with a somewhat different facture — more loose, rough, gestural. I wanted to commemorate the energy of the massed blooms, the creamy glow of the soft pinks. I wanted to capture a kind of slightly faded beauty which echoes Rome itself.

A painting holds time differently than a photograph will. A photograph is of an instant which is its own kind of beauty. A painting, in contrast, is made over a longer period of time, and says different things about time because of this.

These paintings of flowers from the Campo de’Fiori evoke for me, a specific time and place in my life, but once a painting is finished it belongs to the viewer, who will bring their own feelings and thoughts and perhaps memories of a trip to Rome to their experience of the work. I hope that there are resonances in these paintings which are conveyed and expanded upon by the viewer. They will always remind me of the passage of half a lifetime, a blink of an eye, in the story of this amazing city.

If you’re interested in any of these paintings from Rome here are the details:

Campo de’Fiori I — 40” x 60” $7600.00 CAD
Campo de’Fiori II — 40” x 60” $7600.00 CAD
Campo deFiori III — 36” x 36” $5800.00 CAD
Campo de’Fiori IV — 36” x 36” $5800.00 CAD

Please feel free to use the contact form if you have any questions.