The Renaissance lover finally goes to Italy

For the month of September I made myself at home at the Scuola Internazionale de Grafica in Venice.

The rich Renaissance history of the city made it an easy decision to continue my appropriation of the genre, this time picking works that I found around the city.

I ended up deciding on Veronese’s 16th century Christ in the Garden of Gesthemane from the Doge’s Palace and Carpaccio’s Two Venetian Ladies from the late 15th century in the Museo Correr.

Due to the Scuola’s endeavour to practice printmaking with greener methods, it meant I needed to learn spray aquatint instead of the (toxic) method of rosin that I’m used to. I learned that spray aquatint is extremely fickle! It was a major learning curve and I have the 3 failed test plates to show for it. It also resulted in me using oil pastels as my stop out instead of my usual go-to of painted liquid bitumen/ground due to my dislike* of the greener paint option.

All the toils were worth it because I’m thrilled with the results - so different from my usual marks.

*I was too lazy to clean it off