Learning to paint, after a fashion

When I was a bit younger, I was intimidated by the thought of painting. Ink pens are precise, you can find pens with a 0.1 millimetre nib (thanks to Genova's art shops), you don't need to worry about smudging,colours running into each other, having to create a tone. You don't even have to use colours, you can turn everything into an outline and shading, which is a very attractive proposition when faced with chaos and movement. It tends to simplify and strip a scene down to the essentials.When I first began to paint, I tried to paint in the same way I draw - with tiny brushes, very precisely. There is nothing wrong with these paintings, some of them I quite like, but I hadn't yet made the distinction between painting and drawing and how I use them in completely different ways. Sadly, the photos aren't good quality, but they get the idea across.

When I moved to Italy I started to become aware that in order to fix some of the things I was seeing on paper, I would have to switch from ink to paint. For the first time, I've become interested in representing what I see. This is new for me, because for quite some time I held to the view that this was superficial, and what mattered was the response. I still need to explore the response, but when I'm suddenly plonked into such a beautiful environment, I find myself needing to record the stimulus as well. Sadly, I've probably drained Pudsey as a source of visual inspiration. Here it's the opposite, there's too much stuff which makes an impression.
So with paints, I can focus on what I see. This doesn't mean what I paint actually looks like what I saw - I don't tend to go outside and paint, it's how I remember it. It's usually too cold anyway. When I draw, I don't look for inspiration in the same way, it comes automatically and it's a response to how the things I see make me feel. I don't understand most of it and I couldn't explain most of it, but I know that it's from something internal, and not external.
At the moment I'm trying to mix mediums - clearly what I actually have is two different mindsets, one attached to drawng, one painting, and I'm trying to create fluidity between the two. Hence watercolours overlaid with inks. So long as no more people point out a Van Gogh resemblance, I'll be ok. Another thing I find useful is to tear up interestingly coloured card into small pieces and stick it to the card I'll be painting on, because the colour intensifies where the edges meet and is a far more interesting texture to paint on.

Pig head in the Piazza della Vittoria - the markets in Pavia have some really weird food in them, and walking past a whole pig head on a plate was bizarre. What I found utterly bizarre was that where the neck was cut, the flesh inside looked exactly like salami. I always presumed that kind of meat was somehow processed, but it seems to just be very thin slices of that kind of meat. Very odd.

Ponte Coperto, Pavia. This was a birthday card made for a friend. The bridge in Pavia is lovely, the water is a very pure greenish colour, clear, and it's a good place to sit and watch everything. 

Drawn from a photo I took in which, on the off chance, there was a big dog bounding across on the left hand side of the image, which livened up the Piazza. I really liked the contrast between this big furry bundle and a very imperious arena.

Duomo di Milano. This is perhaps the tiniest, about 5 by 5 cm. 

 Meadows. Having a little bit of nostalgia for Oxford means that sometimes I want to return to English scenes I know well, which have of course a very different style of architecture, more austere, grey, imposing, but not to me, because to me is really a kind of home. And in a way, Meadows is the most Italian part of college.

Cornmarket at night. The best thing about the quite ugly street in which I'm constantly mobbed by charity workers etc is that on a night, when coming back to college, you can see it from the top of the road like a white finger which looks so incongruous against HMV and Pret. It often reminds me how surreal it is that I can live there for 3 years.

Milano Centrale, grand work of fascist architecture make into a square of about 7 by 7 cm. On the bus from Porta Venezia one time, I remember wondering whereabouts our stop was, and suddenly seeing this marble white monstrosity rearing up through the window, and feeling really quite awed and intimidated by it.

And, finally, Tom Quad and Tower. It's amazing how much I take it for granted - now I'm here I see it more clearly, but still, looking at this picture it's odd to think that I can have a personal connection with something so austere, so rich and imperious. But I can identify the part of the roof I climbed up onto when drunk, the porter's lodge, the room I have choir practice, the bell tower I've been up. Quite often on a night there when walking back to my room I would look up and the night sky would be incredible, I don't know if we have especially clear skies there, but sometimes it is very overwhelming.