Painting Venice in a Pandemic
While the coronavirus pandemic impacted the whole world in 2020, I painted 20 pictures of Venice, Italy. Iconic views, beautiful lockdown landscapes, and stormy seas are presented here, as well as a seven-foot wide, six-canvas composition of the Doge's Palace Flooded.
These artworks, their themes, and my painting process are explored on this page through a virtual exhibit, links to blogs, and more.
"Painting Venice in a Pandemic" (virtual exhibit)
"Painting in a Pandemic" Blog
At the beginning of 2020, I wanted to follow "My Year of Monet" by painting pictures of Venice, like Monet had done when he was my age. However, as I explain in "Painting in a Pandemic" and "Still Painting in a Pandemic," the project morphed into something bigger and more relevant with the COVID-19 lockdowns in Italy and at home in Carlsbad, CA. The final 2020 article is "New Venice Pandemic Paintings."
The Venice Paintings
Calm before the Storm
The first few paintings were started when life was normal. At that point, I was focusing on Monet-like subjects such as these Venetian houses (below). I wasn't attempting to emulate his style (as I had during my studies of 2019), but rather approached this series with fresh new confidence in my own techniques.
As a matter of fact, I got the idea for this Venice series when I attended a Monet retrospective exhibit in December, 2019 and one of his Doge's Palace masterpieces caught my eye. Here's my rendition:
My wife, Lindsey, and I visited Venice in 2003 and stayed directly across the canal from the Palais Bembo. At that time, I did a watercolor sketch from my hotel room and could only dream of a day I might be skilled enough to attempt an oil painting of the same beautiful building. Mission accomplished!
On our 2003 trip, I only brought along a video camera, and subsequently, didn't have much original source material for my compositions. These two (below) were based on still frames from our home movies:
Otherwise, for source material, I manipulated online images I found and used these vacation photos from my friend George:
The Pandemic Lockdown
In March, 2020 the Covid-19 pandemic was becoming a global phenomenon, and Lindsey and I were under quarantine at our home in Carlsbad, CA. Venice was also under lockdown, and my motifs shifted. Without tourism and countless boats polluting the Venetian lagoon, the water turned clearer and more serene.
Rumors of dolphins and swans returning to the Grand Canal surfaced, and I believed them when I started this picture. Actually, dolphins were confirmed off the coast of Sardinia, Italy, in the Tyrrhenian Sea, not the Adriatic, where Venice sits. Nonetheless, I liked the symbolism of the dolphin's return and included it in the painting. Can you find it?
The swans were in Burano (below), an island suburb of Venice:
Venice Flooded
While searching for potential images to paint, I saw photos of the November, 2019 floods in Venice. Due to storms and high tides, the water levels were exceptionally high; and, that prompted me to make a statement about global warming that would contrast the more traditional, lovely compositions I'd been considering for this series.
The picture below shows the 2019 flooding of the Doge's Palace, a building that dates back to 1340. It survived major fires and centuries of decay before its most recent renovations in 2008.
With increasingly severe weather, this iconic structure is in catastrophic danger.
After I completed these 20 paintings, I spent the final two months of 2020 creating a seven-foot-wide hexaptych (six canvases) featuring the façade of the Doge’s Palace flooded.
As an artist, I'm distraught that this symbolic representation showing the dangers of global warming could conceivably exist on a wall somewhere after its subject, one of the world's architectural masterpieces, is destroyed by rising tides and severe storms.
Individual Canvases:
Details:
