Afternoons often found us at our favorite sidewalk cafe just beyond the Ponte Vecchio on the banks of the Arno River. Some Europeans call late afternoon drinks “sundowners,” which I find more descriptive than our American ‘happy hour.” But I confess that our sundowners often started while the sun was still hard at work and continued long after the sun retired. Waiters brought us limoncello spritzes, those clever little cocktails of lemon liqueur, Prosecco, and soda. When business was slow in the cafe, the waiters would sit at our table and talk. Usually, however, Deborah and I just sat quietly. As tourists rushed by on their busy way from scenes to sites, we sipped, watched, listened, sketched and painted. 

Late one afternoon, as we watched the setting of the sun, the sky alive with dramatic colors, I said to Deborah something to this effect: Almost anyone catching sight of the sky and the river at this moment would gasp softly at the beauty they are witnessing. But I don’t think it is so much the ‘scene’ that evokes the response as the power of the colors, their juxtaposition, the way they resonate with one another. I wish I could translate that onto canvas.

So began an adventure in colors, forms and media which culminated over a year later in the painting, “L’Arno al Tramonto” (The Arno at Sunset), which is the subject of today’s little essay.

The two guides on which I depended throughout this adventure were Wassily Kandinsky and Mark Rothko. While the influence of Rothko is readily apparent in the final painting, though his approach was quite different from mine (and not only at the level of the painting’s substructure which is visible only in person and not in photographs), Kandinsky’s influence actually is more profound. 

Kandinsky, that resolutely European artist whose spirit stands at the headwaters of American Abstract Expressionism, liberates the painter and the viewer from the prison house of objects, going straight for the heart of that which draws us emotionally and spiritually into a painting. One is free, Kandinsky once said, in observing an abstract painting “to look at the picture as a graphic representation of a mood and not as a representation of an object.” He goes beyond this general observation to the insight which has become most beneficial to me: “Color provokes a psychic vibration. Color hides a power still unknown but real, which acts on every part of the human body.” 

In my first attempts to evoke the soft gasp of awe I felt (and still feel) when the sun sets the Arno River aglow, I continued to rely on objective structures. One painting I produced under the tutelage of Lucetta Risaliti echoed the kind of abstract structures that Kandinsky produced in paintings such as his beautiful “Arabian Graveyard” (1909), the vibrant colors gesturing toward an objective scene. In that, my first attempt, classical perspective played a crucial role in the structure of the painting (using dry pigments with an adhesive binder on cardboard), one lamppost after another on the sidewalk guiding the viewer’s eyes toward a single horizon as people walked along the street under a sunset glowing in dramatic reds, pinks, yellows and apricots against a dark blue sky. 

Other small sketches followed, usually in pen and/or watercolor, which included bridges and buildings and clouds reflected on the river’s surface; more recently, pastels even reversed the setting, allowing the Ponte Vecchio to feature against a softer background of colors. All of these failed attempts were, I believe, necessary for me to arrive at the final abstract oil on canvas. 

In this final painting (pictured here), thick black gesso and thin acrylic substructures remind me that there was, as it were, a physical place which included me on a particular day. But my inclusion in that place does not privilege me by separating me from it as an omniscient narrator-observer. I must relinquish a crucial element of control as an artist.  I, like all other things in the “scene,” disappear into the whole, just as we sometimes forget or lose ourselves when caught up in some beautiful moment or an experience of passion, our consciousness flirting momentarily with the fundamental reality; everything emerges from and returns to the same tissue of existence. 

The colors of the sunset over the river provide us with all the artificial structure we need. We enter into a painting which continues to open outwardly, its colors touching us deeply and in ways we cannot put into words. The blending of colors at the edges of the painting contextualizes the sunset while also liberating it from the constraints of the objective.

While I don’t think that Kandinsky fully expresses what one may feel in such a viewing when he calls it “mood,” I find my own vocabulary stretching to a breaking point to describe what it is that we “feel” or “intuit” or perhaps even “know” when confronted with a fully non-objective evocation of such a visual moment. Rothko surely was right in saying that a painting is an experience itself and not merely the depiction of an experience. 

And, yes, the influence of Rothko most fully enters here, although I frankly resisted following him. Why? Certainly because such indebtedness is inevitably and necessarily labeled imitative. But “to free the colors to do their work,” the canvas seemed to argue with me, “you must allow yourself to be humbled by not resisting Rothko’s influence on you.”

As always, I believe the canvas was right, though I felt humbled indeed.