This painting measures 10″ x 14″ and is painted on Arches fine watercolor paper. It is for sale, $250.00

Most people that want me to paint a portrait say “How much” and I tell them, right now I charge $175.00 for a portrait of one person and $250.00 for a portrait of two people. But not everyone commissions a portrait that way. The last time I went to Sersale, I brought a very special gift for my recently deceased cousin’s wife, Santina. It was a portrait of my cousin, Giuseppe Mercuri that I had painted some years before. It showed his wonderful personality and everyone loved it. Even before we got it hung up on the wall a steady procession of cousins, friends and neighbors came through the house and admired that painting.

Annina, Santina’s best buddy and the wife of another cousin saw it and immediately had an idea. She had lost a daughter a few years ago and all she had of her for her little shrine was an enlargement of a blurry photo. So Annina began her negotiations for a portrait of Caterina. First she invited me over for dinner. No, not just any dinner, she’d already fed me many times. This time she made Sersale’s own specialty pasta by hand for me. She made a huge quantity of mparetate, they were gorgeous and delicious.

I ate as many as I could and felt guilty because I could not eat more. This was the first time anyone in Calabria made me homemade pasta.
But that was not all! She gave me wonderful olives, of course she gathered them herself and processed them too. She also gave me half of a Pittanchiusa, a dessert specialty of Sersale’s that is made for Easter. It’s a dough rolled rather thin and stuffed with fruit and nuts, a little bit like a cinnamon roll. Since I’ve never been to Sersale for Easter, I’d never eaten one before. This was a great gift! I was honored and delighted. It was a little stale, but hey, it still tasted good.. The last gift she gave me were some dried figs stuffed with walnuts. Oh, these are so delicious. A combination of two of the most delicious things in the world. The fact is, every one of the things Annina gave me in exchange for the portrait were priceless. How could I NOT paint that portrait?
After I finished the painting, I shipped it off and the worrying began. Would it get to Sersale? and how would I know if she liked it? Once again thanks to Facebook, two of her grandkids friended me. And thanks to them, I knew she had received her painting and was happy with it. A job well done.

You want to commission a portrait? Make me an offer I can’t refuse.

Over the years I have noticed that most people don’t like them very much, they are not inspired by their jewel like beauty like I am. The fact is; they are seedy and can’t hold a candle to a peach. I didn’t know anything else about them except that they were exotic and beautiful, and I continue to eat them annually. I understand the pomegranate might be the forbidden fruit on the tree in the Genesis story.

Many years later, I found my first pomegranates growing in Brescia, Italy. I guess I imagined a great big tree like the old apple and cherry trees I saw as a child, but instead it was a weedy little shrub with these sensational fruit bursting out of it.

besides just pulling a pomegranate apart, and eating the jewel like fruit by the handfuls, my favorite way to eat pomegranates is in a salad. It will transform any boring salad to a thing of beauty.

This watercolor is 10″ x 14″ and is SOLD

Now about Bologna. Like most little kids of the 1950′s I ate a lot of Bologna (Baloney) I even knew it was named after a city in Italy. We carried Bologna sandwiches on Wonderbread in our little metal lunch boxes- I liked my Bologna sandwiches with dark mustard and pickle relish.

Bologna is a city that looks a lot like that Bologna we ate! The city is full of pinkish buildings. It is truly beautiful. It is also full of galleries; covered sidewalks – so you can walk through the town on a rainy day and not get wet. Bologna today is NOT famous for Bologna – instead they are very proud of their Mortadella, a cold cut that gave me terrors as a child because I knew it was made with BRAINS!
While I was in Bologna, my friends and I ate Mortadella proudly served by Bolognese. It was a wonderful day I will never forget. In this painting I sought to reproduce the colors of the city in the clothing that my friends are wearing. This city is truly a feast for the eyes.. And if you like Mortadella, you’ll eat well while you are there too.

One of the most wonderful places in the world is the open air market. The one I painted today is in the Sicilian city of Catania next to their famous pescheria (fish market). Farmers bring their fresh vegetables, butchers bring their freshly cured meats, cheeses can be found, as well as fruits, nuts, all sorts of spices and preserves. Every mercato (the Italian word for market) that I have been to has had its own unique personality. In fact, every day, every mercato is different.
Italy, just like the USA, has plenty of supermarkets with rows upon rows of food in them. However, every day, Italians like to go to their mercato to buy dinner. In Rome, we followed my cousin to a little mercato. Unfortunately, we didn’t have enough of a vocabulary to get all our questions answered about all the things I saw, but we still had a blast. During my next visit, I was in Cefalu, and discovered that at noon every day, the mercato closed only to open again the next morning. All of those little booths, all of those vegetables, meats, and other wares were cleaned up, packed up and disappeared. You’d never know they had been there except for a few wet spots where tubs of ice water had been spilled.
In Catania, where I stayed at the home of my cousin Antonietta and her children, I learned Mercato was part of the routine. Every day after breakfast, everything was cleaned up and we went to the mercato a few blocks from their home. We bought bread, fruit, whatever we needed for the day. Next day, same story. As we walked down the street, other shoppers would greet us, their bags already full.
One of the best recent changes to Seattle, which is my current abode, has been the opening of many farmer’s markets all over the city. the most famous here is Pike Place market, but as the days lengthen and spring comes, you don’t have to go downtown to find farmer’s markets, they are everywhere. How about you? Do you like to shop at a farmer’s market?

I include two different paintings of the same scene here so you can see the progress I have made this year. The lighter colored one is actually one of three attempts, none of them pleased me and I couldn’t figure out what I was doing wrong. I used nice colors and got the shapes right, but I never got the richness of the scene. That is, until today. I am extremely happy with how this painting came out. What about you? Can you see the difference? This is a large (14″ x 20″) watercolor painting on Arches paper.

About the painting; “Sitting in the morning sun” This is a 15″ x 22″ watercolor on Arches paper. It is for sale. It is from a photo that I took early in the morning, while on a stroll through this small hill town. It was extremely peaceful, and this woman had probably just finished her morning chores. If you like a little history, you can read about why I was here in the first place below, or you can go here to read about how I actually got there that day.
One of the reasons I’ve gone to Italy as much as I have was that I wanted to understand what it was that my grandparents left, what they gave up. I have four Italian grandparents, each from a different place. Ok, if we’re going to be technical, my grandfather “from” Atena Lucana was born in Manhattan, but his whole family was from Atena, and that’s where he spent some of his formative years.

My grandfather is the boy on the far left of this photo, which was taken about the time that they went back to Italy, his father stands next to him, and his mother sits beside him.

This particular grandfather, Vincenzo (AKA Jim) Fressola, always resented the fact that instead of growing up to be an all-American guy his parents decided to move back to Italy and take him with them. It was at the most crucial part of his development, when he was a pre-teen. That would have been before 1914, and my very unlucky grandfather ended up fighting in World War I, for the Italian Army. If he had fought for the USA in that war, he would have been a hero with a good pension, and other veteran’s benefits. He always felt cheated because the Italian government never gave him any benefits at all.
As a teenager in Italy, he was probably teased because he was an American, and then of course, discriminated against when he came back to the USA because he was Italian, but America he preferred, and as soon as the war was over, he ended his undistinguished career as a soldier and returned to the USA on the first boat possible (which landed in Boston). On the ship’s passenger list, in a long list of Italian immigrants, his name stands out proudly “US CITIZEN.” He had no good memories of Italy, but he told the rest of us that he had left vast orchards of Olives behind. That was certainly something that seized all of our imaginations. I always wanted to go there to see what exactly it was that he left behind.
So in 2008 I took a bus to Atena (one of my most amazing adventures, you can read about it here), and stayed with a nice lady who lives there, Concetta Mango. It seems that members of her family worked for the Fressola family many years ago. The Fressolas were landowners, not peasants, and I did see their land. I found the town of Atena Lucana to be very picturesque and this painting is a representation of one of the photos I took there. The town is very clean and well cared for. It might have been impoverished 100 years ago, but in 2008 it seemed comfortable and peaceful.

Armed with this photo and many others that I have taken during my travels over the years, I loaded my car with art supplies and not enough food and drove off to Daniel Smith, my absolute favorite Art Supply store, which happens to be 4 miles from my house.
The class was friendly, many of the attendees had taken a workshop from Stella before. She talked a lot about the elements of design (light, composition, and 5 other elements) and her method for producing a nice painting. Then she gave us a demonstration, she painted a boat in some water. I was not impressed with her reference photo, I would never have chosen it for a subject, but by the time she was done, (which didn’t take very long) she had a beautiful luminous painting of a boat on water..
She gave us an exercise, just paint. Just put colors down on paper. Don’t think about it. The results are here:

As I mentioned earlier, I have a treasure trove of photos that I have taken in the last few years, many of which I had hoped I could turn into a painting. But they are too scary for me, so I have never attempted to paint them yet. I took a couple of those along, and this street scene from Napoli, Italia is the first one I tried to paint at the workshop.

Stella is a great coach, she comes in and gives you great suggestions for how a painting can be improved. I would recommend her class to anyone interested in watercolors. She shares my opinion that anything you do to the paper is fair game, including scraping, scratching and scrubbing. As long as there is paper left, it counts. All of the paintings displayed here are very large for me, 15″ x 22″

I already had some teenagers who were my friends on Facebook so I didn’t have high expectations. But Ilenia was different. She quickly became my means of communication with the family in Sersale. So I owed her a great debt of gratitude.

When she saw the painting I did of her grandfather, she immediately asked me if I would paint one of her. I was noncommittal in response to her request, but without really thinking about it, I found myself doing a photo session with Ilenia posing sassily. I really love the way Italian teenagers interact with adults – like we’re all people.

Related: Santina and the Spatulas