People come to Tuscany from abroad and feel that here is a special place where you can step out of your own A4 prosaic reality and enter into a realm where poetry and adventure prevail, a sort of magic interweaves with daily life, and a dream existence becomes possible.
Like in the dream of leaving everything behind to go to live in a boat or to start on a journey with a tribe of indigenous people, as in the subjects of some contemporary books where the main character is a typical modern person from a western civilization who has the courage to leave the known paths in order to fulfill deeper personal needs, there is also a tendency to romanticize life in Tuscany (even if it’s less exotic than those examples!).
Tuscany has become an icon worldwide of a certain lifestyle, even though a few still seem to have only a vague idea of what Tuscany is : it was very funny when in Norway a person met in the street told me she would immediately move to Tuscany since it was her favorite town in the whole world! And she looked really passionate in telling me so. ^_^
Even if those expectations may be in some cases a little exaggerated, because life in Tuscany is not only/always/for everyone glasses of red wine under the sun around a pool while trying your hand at some artistic project (or is it?), yet Tuscany is indeed a place of powerful beauty and peace on many levels.
So many artists feel the need to try to reproduce the beauty of this land on canvases and paper. And they have a lot of success because how can tourists who are temporarily in visit resist the temptation to buy the classical souvenir “Tuscan landscape” and take home with them a little piece of this beauty so they may always recall the peaceful moments spent here, when the vacation is over?
From Lourdes people take blessed water home…from Tuscany one “takes home” the landscape. I know it seems unrelated but I do wonder… what is the message and power of these landscapes?
I have always been contrary to painting Tuscan landscapes ”for the sake of it”, because it’s a quite boring subject for my personal taste, and also too closely associated to the mass phenomena of tourism.
But I do profoundly enjoy my life in Tuscany and it is now so much part of my inner world that it comes out naturally as a ”side effect” in what I paint.
I have decided in this new series of paintings to give a personal twist to the classical way of depicting Tuscany, and to explore the idea of a ”Tuscan Dream”, meaning Tuscany from a dreamer’s perspective, trying not to judge too much this phenomena or give any kind of answer, but to observe and ponder on how Tuscany CAN act on people.
Tuscany seen as a safe and inspiring place where for instance many persons have actually found back to themselves and sometimes recovered from mental and physical discomforts or illnesses arising from the unhappiness their unnatural life was giving them. Is it true that the harmony of life one can experience here can transmit health, inspiration, hope and happiness to sensitive people who were before in the ”wrong” places? if so, what would this mean if one broadens the point of view?
I personally believe that magic exists everywhere if one wishes to find it, but harmony is surely expressed more in certain places than in others, so coming in contact with different energies will definitely result in different grades of happiness, health and satisfaction in people’s lives. To expect that a change of place alone can solve all problems of life might be unrealistic, but certainly the environment one chooses to live in should be tuned in with the deep needs of the person, and some persons just seem to need the peace, the harmony, the presence of nature together with the ”healthily epicurean” lifestyle that one can find in Tuscany. Or some maybe just enjoy the adventure.
The exhibition in Trequanda is approaching its end, and so is my brief holiday.