Painting the Lago d’Orta Series
Lago d’Orta is beautiful. But it is anything but well-behaved. Painting Lake Orta meant diving straight into all that movement.
During my artist residency in Orta San Giulio, I spent a lot of time outdoors. On the water, in the mountains, along the lake. Warmth, wind, rain, sudden sun. Sometimes almost all at once. Painting Lake Orta became a way of holding onto all that movement.
I didn’t want to neatly capture the landscape. No polished Italian postcard with a blue lake, a mountain and some greenery in exactly the right place. I wanted to paint what was happening while I was right in the middle of it.
That is where this series began.
It started on the water. As it often does.
The first work in the series is After Catching the Lake Wake.
I had been wakesurfing. That means riding the wave behind a boat on your board, staying with it, letting go of the rope and constantly finding your balance again. It is fantastic. You can almost dance on the wave, and there is an enormous sense of freedom in it.
Afterwards, I came off the water with that movement still in my body. And I looked at the lake differently. Less as a view, more as something that is constantly moving. Just like all the nature around it.
That first painting is still relatively open. Less layered than some of the works that came later. Green, pink, blue and lilac move freely across the paper. There is space between the marks. Not everything has to be dense or finished.
I hadn’t actually planned to start a series at all. But apparently I wasn’t done with that lake yet. And, as usual, I went full speed ahead trying to get that feeling onto paper.
Surfing, painting, flow
Wakesurfing and painting are surprisingly close to each other for me.
When wakesurfing, you are constantly looking for balance. You respond to the water, the wave, your speed and your own movement. You cannot control everything. In fact, the moment you try too hard, you usually lose the flow.
I recognise that in painting. I look, I start, I respond. I paint over something, bring something back, leave something else alone. Not everything has to pass through my head in detail before it is allowed onto the paper.
At Lago d’Orta, that became very clear.
After wakesurfing, the landscape no longer felt like a still image. I had felt the water. The speed. The wave. The wind. That movement came onto the paper with me.
The title After Catching the Lake Wake comes directly from that. The wake is not just a poetic reference to water. It is literally the wave I had been surfing.
The Wind Is Boss
At Lago d’Orta, I regularly had ideas about what kind of day it was going to be.
The wind had ideas too. Usually, the wind won.
In A Breeze Over the Lake, things are still fairly friendly. Ochre yellow, red, aqua, blue and soft green move through the landscape. Something is happening, but nobody needs to run indoors yet.
In Gusts of Wind Over the Lake, the wind becomes less polite. Pinks, different blues, lilac, warm yellow and green start sliding through each other. The lines become looser and more restless.
And then there is Storm After Surfing. That title hardly needs explaining.
The weather kept changing, and my paintings changed with it. I found that far more interesting than trying to capture the lake neatly.
Wind draws too, by the way. In grass, water, branches and clouds. Once you really start seeing that, it is almost impossible not to keep looking.
I dive in. Not just for the picture.
I don’t want to simply look at a landscape.
I want to get into it. Literally: out on the water. Into the mountains. Walking. Seeing what is around the next bend. And usually the one after that too.
But also in the painting itself. Lago d’Orta needs very little help to look picturesque. That is exactly the danger. Blue lake. Green mountains. Italian light. Pretty little house.
Done. That is not what I am there for.
I would rather look for the moment when the landscape starts to shift. When the light suddenly breaks through in small fragments. When colours change just before the rain. When wet grass turns darker. When pink suddenly makes more sense than the green that was actually there.
At the Lake Under Sunflakes came from one of those moments.
Sunflakes may not officially exist. They do now.
Painting What I Feel
I don’t paint to prove that I looked carefully. I want to know what remains after looking. That is why the colours in this series are not always true to nature. They don’t have to be.
A landscape can become warmer in my memory. Bluer. Pinker. More unruly. Or softer. That does not make it less real to me.
To me, it makes it more.
While I paint, recognisable forms therefore often partly disappear into colour, lines and brushstrokes. Vegetation can merge into a mountain. Water does not have to sit there as a neat blue strip between two green shapes.
I paint what I feel, not only what is right in front of me. So the landscape is allowed to go a little off the rails.
Lots of Layers. Just Like the Weather.
Not all the works in the series are equally layered.
After Catching the Lake Wake is still quite open. In other paintings, more and more paint appeared. More layers, stronger marks, sometimes thicker impasto.
Waterdrops on My Grass is a good example. Dusty pink, blue-grey, green and muted reds sit in and over each other. The paint itself almost becomes landscape: wet, dense, earthy and a little messy.
Grass after rain is rarely particularly tidy either.
That layering was not planned in advance. It developed while I was working.
Sometimes a painting stayed light and open. At other times, something else had to go over it. And then something else. A line removed. A colour brought back. Thicker. Thinner. Broken open again. Start over.
Basically, just like the weather there. One moment warm and calm. Then wind. Rain. Dark sky. And suddenly sun again, as if nothing happened.
The lake wouldn’t sit still. And I felt more and more freedom in that.
Lago d’Orta Series
The Lago d’Orta series consists of original acrylic works on paper, created from my time at the lake: wakesurfing, mountains, warmth, rain, wind, unexpected colours and everything that stayed with me along the way.
Not a record of exactly what Lago d’Orta looked like. But of what it felt like to be right in the middle of it.
