October 3, 2023: Winding Roads -

One of the women in my Italian painting workshop was an architect. She would turn out crisp streetscapes in no time, while I gazed in admiration and envy. I assumed the drafting skills she’d learned as an architect were helping her, but she said she was struggling, because Everything Was Crooked, and All the Steps Were Uneven. She said, “I want to fix it.”

Everything WAS crooked. She was right. Crooked, narrow, and unpredictable. If you turned into a tiny, unfamiliar passageway, you didn’t know whether it would intersect with another, or just end at someone’s front door.

Here's the Via Nicotera, in Antonimina. Even in real life, as a space, it doesn't quite make sense - the archway looks too small, but then turns out to be reasonable when you get to it. I don't know what the porthole is about, but I love that it's there. 

I learned a lot on the workshop. I could have learned more, or concentrated on improving a particular skill, but there were too many options and I couldn’t resist any of them. So I flitted from painting to painting, trying everything.