The stones along the walls of the Bargello in Florence are rubbed smooth by the centuries. It is a place rich with artistic history, and two Hillsdale art students took advantage of that legacy this past summer.
“It was just unbelievable,” sophomore Forester McClatchey said. “I mean, every crack growing out of the wall deserves its own portrait. There are so many layers of history and beauty to it.”
McClatchey, along with senior Jasmine Noman, ventured this summer from Hillsdale’s art studios to “en plein air” painting in the landscapes of Florence, guided by an eccentric Italian woman, Daniela Astone.
“We had this Italian, quirky instructor who had the frizzy big hair and a little face, ––very Italian,” Noman said. “Daniela made me think a lot about composition. She was like, ‘Jasmine, look what you’re drawing, look how you set it up. You have the trees and the hill, but what about your background and foreground? Erase this and think about the foreground the background the values and the colors and look at it together. Is it cohesive work?’”
Impressionism in Italy went beyond the classroom. Noman and McClatchey began looking beyond a single tree to the entirety of Florence.
“It is almost as though Italy was designed by a master artist because it does have a color scheme and the buildings and the landscape mesh so perfectly,” McClatchey said. “I didn’t sleep for 48 hours because I was too excited about exploring. I had to pull a bouncer off my roommate one night. And then, when we were out painting on the tiny sidewalks, there was this truck with a bunch of trees in the back that was zooming past. As he passed me slowly, he just kind of bumped into my palette and dumped a little paint onto my shirt. You have to get used to that in Italy.”
The spontaneity of the Italian culture, Noman said, inspired her artistic abilities and directly influenced a few experiences.
“I just saw this restaurant down a little side street,” she said. “It was really small and I hardly noticed it. And then I was like, ‘this is promising.’ I didn’t even see it on the street, so it’s got to be off the beaten path and then I went in there and the food was great.”
Over the course of four weeks, at the Florence Academy of Art, both McClatchey and Noman learned about oil painting as well as 19th-century Italian landscapists.
“Spending a month there the world starts to open up on you and you realize how many of thousands of years of cool history and churches scattered throughout the city,” McClatchey said. “I’m pretty similar to Jasmine in that I get absorbed with detail, and I was really challenging myself to be more energetic and impressionistic. Daniela kept on emphasizing the variety of brush strokes and just really going for the emphasis of it.”
The class consisted of varied aged groups. There was the high school student who simply wanted to go to Florence, the college students like McClatchy and Noman, the twins from Denmark who decided one day that they were going to be amazing artists, the mom-like Swedish man in his sixties, and then, according to Noman, the “middle aged students who wanted to be artists after their careers ended.”
Noman said the class wasn’t simply set up around a particular scene for the artists to paint or draw. Instructors merely encouraged students to show up at a particular place and time and, once there, they would work at whatever pace suited the students best.
“The class was whatever you needed to work on,” Noman said.
Without cell phones, McClatchey said, it was like living in the “Stone Age.” This made life quite difficult considering the spontaneous nature of the classes, but it also afforded McClatchey opportunities to branch out and see and paint new sights with freedom. One day he left the group and searched for a scene on his own.
“I wanted a particular feel. I wanted an alleyway of trees,” he said. “I didn’t realize how long I had been walking, but I turned around and I saw the perfect view. It was down this curving road, and there were these ancient olive trees that were going down in a line. And it was just a really beautiful composition.”
He painted for three hours.
“The whole trip was characterized by the carefree Italianness,” Noman said. “Like the stores: you notice they are supposed to open at 9 a.m. but they won’t open until 11 a.m. if the owner doesn’t feel like coming in early.”
McClatchey and Noman spent a month striving to capture the essence of all that lay before them as several bystanders offered to buy their paintings or just gave their opinions on the student’s work.
“It seems that is where artists are destined to end up,” McClatchey said. “Its kind of eerie thinking about the names of those artists who passed away in Florence, though. And it’s kind of sweet, but at the same time it has this dark magic about it.”
That magic that has rubbed down the walls of Florence, from past to present, engulfed and imprinted its essence into McClatchey and Noman.
“Ever since going to Italy and doing that painting class I have been seeing brush strokes and colors everywhere in Hillsdale,” McClatchey said.
McClatchey and Noman will be showcasing their landscapes in the upcoming student art show.
