Monday, February 17, 2014

Art in Southern Italy and transformation in Langley, WA

Recently we were so lucky to travel in Italy. In Naples we stayed at a wonderful AirBnB.
It was an old estate house and the hosts were lovely. One evening when we were invited for a drink of Prosecco (yum). They showed us their paintings from the Posillipo School. These painters were right before the Macchiaioli and way before the Impressionists. However, they also painted looser and from LIFE and natural light! 
 Later we went to the Museum in Naples where they had many of the below mentioned painters.
I know you can find way more information on the web. What would we do without this, remain ignorant I guess..... unless you studied art history and I am not sure if there was information spent on these painters in the US.

The Macchiaioli (Italian pronunciation: [makkjaˈjɔːli]) were a group of Italian painters active in Tuscany in the second half of the nineteenth century, who, breaking with the antiquated conventions taught by the Italian academies of art, did much of their painting outdoors in order to capture natural light, shade, and colour. This practice relates the Macchiaioli to the French Impressionists who came to prominence a few years later, although the Macchiaioli pursued somewhat different purposes. The most notable artists of this movement were Giuseppe AbbatiCristiano BantiOdoardo BorraniVincenzo CabiancaAdriano CecioniVito D'AnconaSerafino De TivoliGiovanni FattoriRaffaello SernesiSilvestro Lega andTelemaco Signorini.

The School of Posillipo refers to a loose group of landscape painters, based in the waterfront Posillipo neighborhood of Naples, Italy. While some among them became academicians, it was not a formal school or association. They however, also liked to paint outside and not according to the classic ateliers.
In the 18th century, landscape painting or vedute had emerged as a profitable, and respectable, style of painting. Landcapes were, in part, higher in demand than depictions of Catholic religious imagery to buyers from Protestant Europe during the Age of the Enlightenment. This included the mainly aristocratic travellers on a grand tour of Southern Europe.[1] Items in demand by travellers were paintings evoking memories of the place, playing the role that photographic postcards now fill. Pietro Fabris, for example, had created views of Pompeii and the Volcanic fields surrounding Vesuvius and Etna. In Venice, Canaletto and the Guardi for example, had depicted mainly urban vistas of the waterlogged city. VanvitelliPanini, and Belloto adapted these styles to different urbanscapes in Italy and abroad. Their styles were realistic, and Canaletto was said to use a camara obscura.
Such detailed realism, however, was rarely applied to natural scenery. There was a tradition in Italy of landscape painting dating to the Baroque 17th century withClaude Lorraine in Rome and Salvatore Rosa in Rome and Naples as two distinct trends. Lorraine's landscapes were lush and imagined, and still often anchored in classical stories using subsidiary figures. Rosa painted tempestuous short range arrangements of natural elements, a craggy hillock with perilously perched trees.
At the start of the 19th century in Naples, the premier representative of landscape painters was the Dutch emigree Jacob Philipp Hackert (1737–1807), the court painter of Ferdinand IV, who seem to be following the tradition of Lorraine. His paintings had a stock arrangement of a nearby tree in a pastoral hill or mountainside, and with distant ruins or a recognizable mountain in the background. Volcano-ridden southern Campania and Sicily had such distinctive peaks. The fortunes of Hackert suffered with the rise of the Napoleonic Neoclassicism and the deposition of the Bourbon kingdom of two Sicilies by the French.[2]
Now some local news,  I'm very excited to announce that the Orca Network is bringing a Whale Center to our little town. Whale watching trips leaving right out of our marina.  Visit the website to purchase tickets -

After the workshop you could take an extra day to explore our beautiful island.

Our little town is undergoing an amazing transformation right now.  2nd Street has a major facelift occurring and will be beautiful once it is finished.
All businesses are open and of course our wonderful French Bistro is also, we recommend reservations.

For accommodations please check out our accommodations page on the website