Travel, Photograph, Experience
Notes on a journey
Italy: The Street Artist
I love coming across street artists when I travel. They are often working close to one of the big art museums. This guy, doing his version of the famous Vermeer, was just outside the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. Right next to him was an artist doing da Vinci.
The guy doing the Mona Lisa seems to be a bit out of his league here. But hey, his canvas is a sidewalk. And at least he’s imitating one of Florence’s famous progeny. Vermeer was from Delft and never set foot in Italy.
Walking in the Master’s Footsteps
As a photographer, I like these kinds of art for two reasons. First, this on-the-ground art work reminds me of the training an artist gets from imitating one of the great masters. During the time of Michelangelo and da Vinci, that’s how artists learned their craft–and it was considered a craft back then, a job similar to a woodworker or silversmith.
The young boy went to live with a master painter or sculptor and his family. And he started by doing the grunt work, housework, prepping the canvas. Then, he would do sketches and have lessons from the master during down time.
After a few years, the apprentice would do the less important parts of a master’s painting, the folds of a dress, the sky; maybe paint a lesser character in the painting. The master would do the work that required subtlety — the face of Christ or Mary. And you can sometimes see a painting by Titian or Bellini and spot sections that are not at the level of the master, sometimes not even getting their style.
So when I see a painter copying one of the master works in an art class or on the street, it reminds me of the value of following in the footsteps, of making the same brushstrokes an old master must have chosen to create a work of art. That’s part of the learning process.
Capturing the Levels of Reality
Looking at sidewalk art also gives me of the sense of several layers of reality coexisting: the art work has it’s own internal space, it’s on a sidewalk that is in use, and the artist is there — as ferryman between these two different realms. So capturing the sense of these various realities is an interesting challenge.
Capturing the layers of artistic reality can be done in a photo is lots of different ways.
Sculpture and family in Boboli Garden, Florence
Here, the two realities, a happy family and a dark vision of the human persona, coexist in an uneasy way (made more so by my intensifying the sculpture in Lightroom).
Here we get the layers of reality by looking over the painter’s shoulder.
Venice Painter
I was able to shoot this late at night. And that intensifies the focus in the photograph on the three layers: painter, subject, art work. If I had shot the same location at mid-day, the tourists and visual noise would have been too in-your-face, the magic would have been lost.
Here’s a variation on the theme:
Same painter but with an observer looking over his shoulder; the street flow a dark blur in the background.
And finally, exhausted tourists sitting in front of the Florence sculpture garden at Piazza della Signoria.
Travel, Photograph, Experience 