Sfumato: Italian Landscape Monotypes

I first traveled to Italy in 1996, and my first encounter with Italian art accomplishments profoundly affected the way I think about and approach making art. The title of this show pays homage to Leonardo da Vinci who was one of the first artists to seriously fuse landscape subject matter into portrait paintings. Historians often refer to those portraits as the first psychological portraits. Sfumato, or “smoky haze,” contributes to the mystery in Leonardo’s work. Leonardo’s drawings show repeated study of the Italian landscape including vast vistas and close-up biological detail studies. Leonardo’s use of sfumato and my own study of the Italian landscape inspired the atmospheric qualities depicted in this series of monotypes.

I returned to Italy in 2002 to explore the Italian landscape as a subject for my work. I began by spending ten days making digital photographs and sketches in Rome. Each day, I gathered as much visual data as possible. I then traveled to Florence where I used the data I collected in Rome to make monotypes in the print studio at Santa Reparata International School of Art. During this time, I continued visiting rural and urban areas shooting digital photographs of potential subjects throughout the city and the countryside.

Monotype combines the immediacy of painting with the graphic character of printmaking. First, I paint my image onto a printmaking plate that has not been engraved or etched. Once I finish the painted image I transfer the image from the plate to paper using an etching press. The resulting image is a one-of-a-kind print. This medium allows me to experiment quickly with a variety of ideas.

The Italian landscape offered new forms for me to study including cypress trees, umbrella pines, and architectural remains. Each tree forms a distinctive silhouette, especially when viewed from a distance. The cypress trees function as sentinels in the landscape standing watch over larger areas and providing screens for protection. The umbrella pines grow high and wide. They provide additional protection from the strong sunlight that pervades the Mediterranean region. The architectural remains provide evidence of the past grandeur of human achievement. The ancient structures have lost their classical perfection, but they still impose strong geometric order onto the landscape. I emphasize these forms in the monotypes because of their distinctive shapes and the opportunities for creating positive-negative spatial relationships in my compositions.

I drew many of these images from the most ancient parts of Rome including the Forum and the Palatine Hill. These areas have changed often through the centuries and, as such, provided me with a number of opportunities to explore the formal themes that appear in my work. These themes include a contrast between the man-made structures and the natural, shifting transitions from soft to harsh light, and an endless array of spatial relationships. These formal concerns combined with the subjects result in content dealing with transformation, transition, isolation, anxiety, and mystery. In all of my work, I choose to emphasize feeling over description. The resulting monotypes depict ambiguous environments devoid of the presence of actual humans but filled with evidence of human existence. I use a restricted monochromatic palette to separate the images from the real world so that the viewer can enter into a fictive psychological environment. These monotypes connect the past to the present and transform the present into the possible.