buon giorno
December 6th, 2006I almost forgot to post pictures of my spreads in Claire’s Italy AB. I had my spread all worked out, and had done my research, gathered materials, and was all set to work my magic (!!) until all of a sudden I changed my mind and decided the theme I had chosen wasn’t suitable. Then I floudered, for what felt like the longest time. Luckily inspiration came to me via some junk mail, now that’s not as absurd as it may seem. I was staring dumbly at the little Italian book when Miles came over with some junk mail that he had opened, and he put it down on the desk, saying something along the lines of “thought this might be useful for that book on Italy you’re having problems with”. I opened the papers and was gob-smacked, it was perfect, and my head was immediately filled with ideas for what I could do and how I could do it. So, here are the ‘fruits of my labour’.
I painted the pages with a pale wash of purple pearlescent watercolours, and then covered the pages with scrunched up, then roughtly smoothed purple tissue paper, to add some texture to the page. The papers that I used at the top and bottom of the spread are torn from a picture of Florence, made in 1470, using a wood cut. Since I was using Florence as the theme for the spread, and I had already decided that I wanted to feature Italian art/artists that wasn’t the Mona Lisa or Leonardo De Vinci, I began researching artists from Florence.
I found that many Italian artists had live and worked in the region, at some time during their lives, but that wasn’t quite what I was loooking for. Then, the art of Agnolo Bronzino caught my eye, and I was thrilled to read that he was born, and died in Florence, so there it is, a home-grown talent. I love many of the regal portraits he painted and his interpretation of some of the mythological and literary characters look like so much fun. I re-sized and printed out a few of Bronzino’s paintings and laminated them before adding frames to the pictures. I thought laminating them might encourage viewers to take them out and have a good look at them. They turned out better than I had hoped. I made a pocket on the right side of the spread and then added another image from the junk mail, on the left.
The signing in instructions for the book were to decorate a tag, ao I used another image from the wood cut print image, and added an Italian stamp, similar to the one I used at the bottom-right of the spread. I was pretty pleased with my work in this book, and I think it hit the right ‘note’, more-so than my planned spread of The Italian Job, would have anyway.
