Savoring Fleeting Moments: Rome Winter Sunset

Savoring Fleeting Moments: Rome Winter Sunset

Rome has many magical moments and one of them is the sunset in this city. Almost every evening the sunset is a spectacle, so orange or pink, lighting the already colorful buildings and reflecting in the water along the Tiber river.

The evening or very early in the morning I find are the best times to be out in the city- strolling the streets and just taking it all in. This afternoon late last winter I took out my easel to capture this fleeting moment in Villa Pamphili with the sun setting behind the blue hills, accentuating the blues and purples contrasting with the glowing orange of the sky. I loved the back lighting in this situation, looking into the sky and it grew darker.

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Winter Sunset, Villa Pamphili
Oil on Linen
8 x 13″
$500 | Available

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I love the challenge of capturing a moment, it is always a challenge and you must paint so many of these to get just one that communicates and works out.

Plein air painting is just that way- you have a fleeting moment to try a capture and when I say capture, I mean to create a whole united world on the canvas. These paintings are more like notes, a skeleton. And though they are finished pieces unto themselves, they are never the same as studio pieces where the artist has time to iron out the wrinkles, correct and re-correct the passages that don’t hold together quite as well.

The reason I have loved painting en plein air all of these years is just for these imperfections. I savor the imperfectness and value the spontaneity of reacting to a moment to the labored perfection that can be resolved in the studio.

Neither is better or even preferred really, it is just a give and take, a trade off. I do spend time working larger pieces in the studio once I have the skeleton in place, but nothing can ever be a substitute to painting what you feel about a place in that very moment that it unfolds itself before you.