In just a short while I will be embarking on my journey to Italy and wanted to share a little of what I have been working on these past few months in preparation.
My Orvieto workshop, entitled The Journal as Reliquary, is one that I actually designed as a conceptual journey’s journal and taught at Altered Jubilee a few years back. It was inspired by a visit to the Isabella Stewart Gardener Museum in Boston. Visiting that museum was like travelling back in time to a Venetian palazzo, the Palazzo Barbaro specifically, where Henry James lived and wrote as a guest many times. I was so inspired by my experiences at the Gardener Museum, that I built a class around it. Unlike that first class, this is not an imaginary journey to Italy, and the work that we do will be specific to Orvieto, a city whose history spans 3000 years. With such an expansive history at first I was all over the place, there was just so much material to be inspired by. But ultimately what captured my imagination was the Orvieto duomo (cathedral). It took nearly 200 years to complete the structure, and its embellishment spanned multiple periods in art. Inside the duomo, is the San Brizio Chapel, wherein lies a glittering reliquary which houses a sacred relic. I found my artistic model here, and sought to achieve the look of Italian antiquity, something precious from the past, in which to preserve the memories of our journey. I love the idea of playing with metaphors and sometimes it happened quite deliberately and at other times it just happened.
What has truly amazed me about this process of discovering Orvieto’s layered past, is that one thing always leads to another. Inside the San Brizio Chapel, in the vaults and on the upper walls, are the magnificent frescos of Renaissance master Luca Signorelli, interpretations of the events surrounding the apocalypse. I began to wonder about his use of materials, particularly gold, as one of the features of my workshop will be gilding. I wondered, how did this Renaissance artist achieve gold embossed expanses in his frescos? As it turns out, gold leafing, like all artist tools and materials, was manufactured by the artists themselves and gold leaf was achieved as a result of hammering gold coins between layers of vellum. The gold leaf was subsequently burnished onto a wood or plaster surface with a stone.
Learning how the gold areas of the frescoes were achieved led to questions about the process of fresco painting itself. There are actually several approaches to the process. The word fresco actually means fresh, as in fresh plaster, and this method is considered true fresco or buon fresco. A buon fresco is created with pigments dissolved in water and painted onto a prepared surface of wet plaster. Sometimes artists would create a fresco secco, painting on dry plaster with tempera, pigments utilizing egg yolk as a binding agent. Fresco seccos are not as long lasting, as over time the tempera will lift and peel. Because plaster contains lime, not all pigments are suited to the process and consequently fresco paintings lean toward earthier color variations. Many Italian Renaissance artists worked with natural chalks made from mineral pigments for drawing, excavated from the earth then shaped into sticks. In praise of their ingenuity, we will be doing some pastel work in our journals.
Humbly creating in the shadows of the great masters has been a bit daunting but with ingenuity and planning, I knew we could indeed travel like artists, unencumbered by shopping bags of materials and return home with visual imprints of our magical Adventure in Italy. So my goal was not only to create a glittering reliquarial journal, but to construct daily journaling exercises to capture impressions of our art and architecture-centered cultural explorations, but to do so with a minimum of materials so that we can work communally in our bottega as well as at a sidewalk café, on the train, on the plane, whenever or where ever inspiration and opportunity presented.
Our cultural tours will consist of walking and architectural tours of the town, a visit to a winery in the countryside, a cooking lesson where we will actually prepare our evening meal, wine tastings in the cellars which are actually part of the elaborate labyrinth created by the Etruscans, and of course a visit to the Orvieto duomo and San Brizio Chapel. So, with that those activities in mind, here are examples of a few of the journal exercises I have been developing.
Thank you so much for taking time out of your busy lives to visit. Ciao for now!
