Paths and a Patch.

Here are some paintings of where I live in Liguria, Italy.  They were all done in Spring and from life hence the spring greens.

thewaytosantamaria_oilpainting_annadennis
The Way to Santa Maria. 60cm x 50cm, oil on panel.

There is a man in Santa Maria, this small hamlet above who once gave us some delicious onion sets from seeds that he has been using from the past fifty years, and before.  They are the sweetest onions to be eaten raw in salads or stuffed.  Not many people around here buy seeds but have been reseeding from the existing plant.  So they say the tomatoes that are easily diseased are always the seeds bought from the mass producers in the shops!

pathinspring
Path in Spring. 35cm x 45cm, oil on wood.

This road takes you to another nearby village called Sasseta. Thirty years ago there was only a mule track but times have changed and there is now a road which even more bumpy than the mule track.

inthegarden_oilpainting2_annadennis
In the Garden. 75cm x 90cm, oil on canvas.

Our vegetable garden with sunflowers and cucumbers and various other things including my children having a snack 🙂

wisteriainbud
Wisteria before Bloom. 20cm x 30cm, oil on wood.

There is something I find a bit overwhelming when painting a Wisteria tree when it is in full bloom so here is a little sketch of it about to come into flower.

Ciao for now and just to keep up to date I will be posting some paintings from this summer soon!

Purple Haze

Wisteria.  Oil on board, 26cm x 42cm
Wisteria. Oil on Board, 26cm x 42cm

One of the most exciting things in Spring is waiting for the Wisteria to burst into cascading purple flowers (yes, my life is pretty exciting 😉 ) but after painting this I am pretty glad to wait another year until it flowers again.

Apparantly purple is a colour linked with royalty and mystery and it is also a difficult colour for our eye to discriminate because it has the shortest wavelength in the light spectrum. I definently found this to be true while painting and comparing the flowers to the green grass!