A Sicilian Landscape

The first sketch, View from Caccamo with Norman Castle. 8.5" x 5.5", gouache on paper.

After finishing Luisa Igloria's book and sending the files off to the printer, I was anxious to do some drawing or painting. Winter being what it is around here, my thoughts kept returning to Sicily, and some of the beautiful landscapes we had seen. I decided to sketch a view from the village of Caccamo, high up in the mountains south of Palermo, with its 10th century Norman castle. It had been a dark day with some rain and dramatic clouds that came and went. As we stood in this spot and watched, the sunlight hit the field in the center, turning it chartreuse. The terracotta tile roofs were echoed in the rocks below the castle, and in pomegranate fruits growing in the nearby bushes. The river wasn't blue, but muddy from the rain, creating a line of beige that was similar in hue to the stucco and the rocky outcrop below the castle. The bright ochre hill at center right found cousins in the sunlit leaves and rocks. And if handled adroitly (which hasn't happened yet!) the darkest green vegetation could serve like drawing ink, leading the eye in sinuous curves across the foreground, up the outcrop to the castle, across the fields in multiple lines, and back across the bank of the river. In actuality, I didn't see that possibility until now.

I did these two sketches, which ended up being paintings in gouache, in a small sketchbook of toned paper -- and I wish I had done them larger, on good watercolor paper. That's OK: live and learn. And I did learn quite a bit about gouache, or opaque watercolor -- it's not a medium I've worked with very much, but I do like it for its saturated color, easy workability, and versatility when combined with other media.

The sketch at the top of the post was the first one, done very quickly -- I like its spontaneity and freedom.

Then I did a more detailed drawing:

And worked over it with gouache, then added some colored pencil at the end.

The second sketch, View from Caccamo with Norman Castle. 8.5" x 5.5", gouache on paper.

I don't think either of these attempts is better than the other, they're just different, and neither was intended as an end in itself. My goal was to have fun with the process and the medium, to try to capture the feeling of the landscape, to aim for harmonious rather than realistic color, and freely suggest the details and variation in the landscape rather than depicting them tightly. This would be easier if working at a larger size.

The details that follow are larger than life-size (this would have been a better scale to work at!)

It's interesting to use gouache rather than transparent watercolor - a medium with which I'm more adept and familiar. For one thing, you can work back into it - the color on the surface dissolves and you can play with it. It's an excellent sketching medium on uncoated, toned paper because the pigment binder makes it sits up on the surface, whereas transparent watercolor would sink in and lose its luminosity. Highlights and lighter details can be added later with other media, such as pencil, ink, acrylic, or with white-based gouache.

These preliminary sketches were a good way to begin familiarizing myself with this scene in case I decide to do a larger watercolor, pastel or oil, any of which would be worth trying. I learned more about what I liked about the composition, how the colors work together across the landscape, and what gives the scene "life," as well as what to leave out or de-emphasize.

One of the challenges of these Italian landscapes is that what attracts and leads the eye is strong, often dramatic, structure -- but also a lot of enticing and beautiful detail -- orchards and vineyards, patchworks of fields, outbuildings, ruins, hedgerows, rocks and outcrops, streams. If all the detail were lost, it wouldn't look like Italy, but we aren't Renaissance painters who want to paint every leaf, so there are choices to be made, and no one "right way" to do it. Drawing and color sketching are the best ways I've found to search out the elements in any composition (not just a landscape) that are the most compelling and that serve -- like elements of a novel's plot -- to move the picture, or the story, where it wants to go. What I haven't captured successfully here is the play of light -- and in this scene, the light was the character most responsible for the drama.

Comments

[Vivian]

Oh Beth it's a feast to have both your painting/drawing process as you go along with it and your articulate perspective on all of it! Thank you!

[Beth]

Thank you, Vivian!

[Natalie]

These are lovely, Beth, and very much your own vision. The way you've blended the hard structure of the landscape into its softer more 'vegetal' elements, especially in the top image. It's an exploratory, questioning, receptive approach, almost humble if that's the right word. It will be great to see what develops if you continue to develop your impressions of the Sicilian landscape.

[Beth]

Thank you, Natalie -- I'm glad if these sketches created that kind of impression, and delighted by your words "almost humble," because that is often how I felt in the Sicilian landscape. That feeling came both from its natural beauty and power, and from the traces of human history written on the land from ancient times to the present day -- seeing olives being harvested by migrants, for instance. To try to do something with that, as one person, one artist, is humbling. But I liked this first attempt, and will definitely keep at it because the place seems to have become embedded in me, like Iceland!