Me vs. Tiepolo

I will admit that I knew very little about Tiepolo before my recent trip to Italy. I saw this painting - "Neptune Offering Gifts to Venice" - in the doge's palace in Venice and was absolutely floored. I then went on to see a whole lot of Tiepolo's work at various museums around Italy, including an amazing exhibit of his drawings in Rome. That man definitely earned his place among the masters.

This drawing is a detail just showing Neptune offering up his gifts (maybe I'll draw Venice another time). I did this in the Moleskine sketchbook with compressed charcoal.

In-Flight Entertainment

The only downside of my recent trip to Italy was the length of the flight from Seattle. I don't remember exactly how long it was - 9 hours? 10 hours? A billion years? At a certain point, time just stopped and I was trapped in an endless void of mediocre movies and small children kicking the back of my seat. In an effort to keep myself entertained, I started flipping through the in-flight magazine for interesting photos to use as drawing material. I really hit a winner on this one. The subject's name is Avi Bitter and, according to "High Life" magazine, he is a former Turkish pop star who now runs a kebab restaurant in Tel Aviv. If I'm ever in Tel Aviv, I will definitely pay him a visit.

Two From Venice

I recently spent two amazing weeks in Italy with my wife, during which I had grand plans of strolling around with my sketchbook to capture the amazing architecture and the vibrant street life all around us. The problem is, there are only so many hours in the day, and we had immortal masterworks to look at, pizza to eat, wine to drink while lounging in the piazza, and, well... we were on vacation for crying out loud. So the sketchbook mostly stayed in my suitcase as I stared with slack-jawed amazement at the work of the great masters.

I did manage a couple of quick ones in Venice. The drawing on top is an ink sketch of a statue in front of Santa Maria Del Rosario. The pencil sketch on the bottom is a very abbreviated attempt at the domes of Santa Maria del Salute from the balcony of our hotel. I would have worked in more detail, but I felt that it was more important to run out to the bar for wine and fried seafood. So much for suffering for my art.