Pen & Ink drawings of my first travel to ITALY in Sicily, Naples, Rome and Florence... 2007

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I am very grateful to my  Cristina Rösel for sending me excellent photographs of this group of works that she kindly commissioned when she saw my "Italian" sketchbook which I had filled with mostly color-pencil studies of the buildings and places I visited in 2004 and 2007. Cristina shared with me the story of how she somehow misplaced the batch of these works for several years, thinking that a framer in Buenos Aires had deftly kept them, seeing that she could not quite make up her mind as to how to frame them: then the entire "lot" appeared behind some favorite books in her library at home in Sāo Carlos, Brazil, where she resides!

 

While the color versions of all but one of these vedute were executed in situ, the works in ink required careful measurement of almost a grid with numbers still visible along the margins used to ensure the transfer of the images would be as much like the compositions in pencil. The ink medium and stylus point being as they are, to create the effect of lighter, middle tone, or dark shades depends on hand pressure, among other elements -- capable, by the way, of producing gradations and feelings impossible to obtain from mechanical ink markers and certainly from computer painting or graphics keyboards and commands.

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It is gratifying to remember that following the commission of these ink views / vedute, by Mrs. Cristina Rösel in Brazil, the Director of the Dante Aligheri Society in Miami, Claudio Pastor, and the secretary to the Italian Consul in Miami, Alessandra Ravaioli, I had the opportunity to show these works at one of their exhibit spaces on Douglas Road, and this event led to my coming to Italy on a teaching assignment in Fall 2008 -- for the University of Miami/ School of Architecture in Coral Gables Rome Program led by Professor Teofilo Victoria.