A Blog about Art by Pia De Girolamo

By Pia De Girolamo

January 2023

January is a transitional month of endings and beginnings. In art, the god Janus is depicted as having two faces, one looking ahead and one looking backwards. So it is fitting that in January people feel moved to take stock, review the old year, and make plans for the new. During this liminal time at the beginning of the month, I happened to be walking the dog when a memory about art emerged from a stream of thoughts. I remembered reading in a book* on aesthetics that art “intensifies the sense of immediate living” and by art, the author means everything from cave paintings, to tattoos, to pottery, jewelry, poetry, theater etc. *(Art as Experience by John Dewey—it’s a bear to get through, so don’t start reading it unless you really want some brain calisthenics). As one thought led to another, I started wondering about why art exists and why I make it, topics that I find useful and interesting to revisit from time to time.

Callla Lily by Pia De Girolamo

Picasso said “Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life“. While art can be escapist it can also lift a veil and remind us to see and experience reality, the good and the bad, which often gets lost in the fog of our thoughts and the busyness of our lives. When we put ourselves on auto pilot we forget to look, to feel, and to appreciate a tree, a place, a person, a landscape, a rock, a cup of coffee, a crumbling, graffitied building. It allows us to see with fresh eyes and with a “Beginner’s Mind”.

Why do I make art? Making art makes me an explorer of the world.  It allows me to experience things twice-once in real life and once again in the studio. My inquisitiveness is engaged and I look at things more closely and experience more fully in order to get them down on paper or canvas.

Art takes me “out of my head” when a painting is clicking along without me having to think about it and I am in a state of flow. State of flow is like a form of meditation and often like a mini-vacation.  At some point after the flow ceases though, the analytical brain takes over with its narrative of critique-does it work? is it balanced? is it interesting? Which is usually necessary to some degree to bring a painting to fruition. Even though this is the “rational” brain engaging it is a very interesting exercise because it poses questions and what ifs as in “what happens if I change this color, or this shape and so on and how does it affect the rest of the painting”? These questions lead to other questions and keeps me fascinated with the process of creating.

Elizabeth Gilbert in her book Big Magic says she writes solely because she likes to, she enjoys her creativity, and writing is fun! And really isn’t that the bottom line?  I make art because I love making art! I am delighted by the process that takes me from a blank canvas to something completely new. Art making is of course frustrating at times and closing the gap between intention and execution is a tricky tightrope to walk, but the totality of the act of creation is fun and exciting, sometimes just because it is challenging and the outcome is not assured.

Art is a means of connection with other people. I especially love it when a viewer can tell me how and why my art moved them. It’s also interesting when a viewer sees a meaning or feeling that I did not consciously intend but subconsciously might be there. Then I deepen my understanding of the work as well as myself, and that may help me make the next painting. Even if the viewer’s interpretation is way off base, if it helps them make a connection with the work, the art has found a way to forge a personal connection.

Ainsley in the Green Chair by Pia De Girolamo

78°N 16°E: The Arctic Series an exhibition of paintings by Pia De Girolamo at Cerulean Gallery, Philadelphia, Jan 13-Feb 7, 2021

One week in the Svalbard Archipelago above the Arctic Circle in May of 2019 was all it took for this unforgettable environment to insinuate itself into my paintings.  Since that trip, the Arctic landscape and fauna became the subject of a series of paintings. I have been to many rugged isolated locales but visiting the Arctic was like visiting another planet. Not only were there vast expanses of water and masses of ice in varied configurations but the light was unique. It lasted all day, for one. The sun never set but merely dipped to just above the horizon where it shown weakly before it rose up again. I never felt like sleeping. Changing light could transform a landscape from a blazing bright vision to a brooding, moody vista.

The local inhabitants were equally interesting. Polar bears, seals, walruses, pods of beluga whales, arctic terns and more revealed themselves. I felt like an interloper. As much as I was grateful to be taking this trip part of me felt that perhaps I shouldn’t have come. This place of pristine beauty had already been touched by humans, often quite savagely, for centuries; whale species decimated by the hundreds of thousands, failed mining operations, polar explorations by dogsled, plane and dirigible, and most recently, research stations and who knows what other secret installations, their satellite dishes and huts set down upon mountain tops . Climate change already affected the area and produced that first rains ever seen.

I brought a small sketch book and took lots of photos. When I got back to my studio, and reviewed them, the images flowed onto the canvas and panels and they kept on coming.  

Coincidentally, the images of isolated landscapes resonated powerfully with the social distancing we were all doing while in lockdown during the COVID 19 pandemic. Layered upon the formalistic qualities of the painting as a reflection of the landscape and the powerful impressions arising from that immediate experience, was the experience of uncertainty, fear and disconnection produced by the pandemic.

The Anthropocene is fully upon us and we and successive generations will bear its consequences but perhaps we can still make things better for future generations by stopping the headlong rush to destroy the earth. I hope that these paintings are a reminder to others there is beauty and life and treasure at the top of the world that is worth saving. If we save it, we save ourselves. That this  series ended up being shaped by my response to the realities of the pandemic also makes it one record of art created during an unprecedented planet-wide catastrophe.  

Above, Campanile Blu, acrylic on canvas 48″ x 48″. Below, Parco della Villa Ada, acrylic on canvas, 30″ x 40″. By Pia De Girolamo.

Being There: An Exhibition of Paintings by Pia De Girolamo

Cerulean Arts Gallery 1355 Ridge Ave. Philadelphia September 18-October 13, 2019

Reception: Sept. 21, 2-5PM

Being There is a series of large and small scale paintings based on the experience of living in Rome for five weeks in the fall of 2018. I have ancestral roots and close ties to Italy, and Rome has been a "home away from home" since childhood, so I was thrilled when the opportunity arose to spend a considerable stretch of time there, as I used to do as a child. We rented an apartment in the Quartiere Trieste, a lively neighborhood with a melange of architectural styles, buildings painted in vivid colors and the huge, semi-wild Parco della Villa Ada a few blocks away.

I sketched and painted with watercolor crayon daily from the vantage point of our apartment on the fifth floor and in the Villa Ada park. My work in the last several years has centered on the landscape, in particular, wild, rugged, out-of-the-way places as diverse as Iceland and Patagonia. When I came back from Rome to work in my studio in the US, I continued to explore aspects of the urban landscape and this series, Being There was the result.

Roots and Art: An Exhibition in Rome//

I came across this photo recently and though I was quite familiar with it, I suddenly had some new insights upon seeing it again. My grandfather is on the left. He is my father's father. My father is on the right. I am in the middle holding both their hands. The Empire State Building rises through the fog in the background. I am guessing we are on the Chrysler Bldg. My grandfather is an Italian from a country village in Campania and lived in Italy his whole life. This was his first trip to America. My father, an American citizen was a young physician who had emigrated from Italy a few years before.  My mother emigrated from Italy as well, having arrived as a child. I was born in New York City, in Queens. I have no idea who took the photo.

To me, this is an iconic image; I am sure there are many others like it, taken in the same place, in the years before and after. My grandfather's expression seems a little bemused to me, perhaps at finding himself in the exotic urbanity of New York City and by the fact that he has never been up so high up in his life (other than being in the airplane he took to the US-also the first time he had been in an airplane).  My father's expression seems more confident, but I can't see his eyes behind the cool shades to be able to really tell. I look happiest, I think.

There I am in this photo, a product of the new world, holding hands with the old world.  This is my home. I am destined to grow up here, but unlike earlier generations, I also have the opportunity to maintain my ties with my family's country of origin. The split could be a little problematic growing up. It is almost a cliché to say that I felt Italian in America and American in Italy, but that's the way it was.  Though it might have made for some difficulties in forging an identity, I always appreciated the uniqueness and richness of my experience.

Throughout my life I have maintained one foot in America and one in Italy, so when the opportunity arose to present my work in Rome I was eager to accept it. Rome was a home away from home, where I spent summers with my maternal grandparents. They had returned to Italy upon retirement to live in Rome after having lived many years in the US.

Artists absorb the lessons of earlier generations in creating their own unique work. We sometimes ask each other the questions "who are you looking at" to more fully understand the influences underpinning each other's work. So it is very exciting to me that the Philadelphia Museum of Art is currently presenting an exhibition which showcases many of the artists who I "look at" to inspire my work.  The exhibition, entitled Modern Times: American Art 1910-1950 from April 18-September 3, features fine examples from a variety of American artists from the early 20th Century including Georgia O'Keefe, Milton Avery, Marsden Hartley and Arthur Dove, among others. Focusing on distinctive American sites, they used color and shape in an abstract way to put their own personal stamp on the landscape tradition in painting. One museum note explains that, "they tried to infuse their work with the spirit of these sites, not simply to record the visual details of the topography,...emphasizing selected elements and eliminating others to convey the essence and power of these places."

In my work, natural forms inspire the shapes, spaces, lines and colors that I use to convey to essence of place. Some paintings refer to real places, others spring from composite memories of shapes or vistas. All are a record of what is for me of the essence in these landscapes, whether they are in Iceland, the Canadian Rockies, Patagonia or the American Southwest.

pal·imp·sest

pal·imp·sest

ˈpaləm(p)ˌsest/

noun

noun: palimpsest; plural noun: palimpsests

1.    a manuscript or piece of writing material on which the original writing has been effaced to make room for later writing but of which traces remain.

- something reused or altered but still bearing visible traces of its earlier form 

2.mid 17thcentury: via Latin from Greek palimpsēstos, from palin ‘again’     + psēstos ‘rubbed smooth.’

 pen·ti·men·to

ˌpen(t)əˈmen(t)ō/

noun

noun: pentimento; plural noun: pentimenti

1  a visible trace of earlier painting beneath a layer or layers of paint on a canvas.




early 20th century: from Italian, literally ‘repentance.’

(Definitions from google dictionary)

Dyrhòlaey, Acrylic on canvas, 35″ x 48″, 2017

Recently I read an essay1 by the poet, writer and environmental activist Wendell Berry, in which he describes why he writes his poetry and novels in long hand and refuses to use a computer. "To reduce or shortcut the intimacy of the body's involvement in the making of a work of art...inevitably risks reducing the work of art and the art itself."

He notes how when corrections are made on a computer "one presses a button and the old version disappears, to be replaced by the new", which is not the case when one writes in longhand or uses a typewriter. He goes on to say, "A handwritten or typewritten page therefore is usually to some degree a palimpsest; it contains parts and relics of its own history--erasure, passages crossed out, interlineations--suggesting that there is something to go back to as well as something to go forward to...The well crafted table or cabinet embodies the memory of (because it embodies respect for) the tree it was made of and the forest in which the tree stood. The work of certain potters embodies the memory that the clay was dug from the earth...All good human work remembers its history. The best writing, even when printed, is full of intimations that it is the present version of earlier versions of itself, and that its maker inherited the work and the ways of earlier makers. It thus keeps, even in print, a suggestion of the quality of the handwritten page: it is a palimpsest."

Berry has other reasons for not using a computer in general; he wants to reduce his reliance on "the energy companies" and the environmentally degrading way they produce electricity. But his staunch environmental activism aside, I suspect that with regard to his writing at least, his use of longhand is very much part of the idiosyncratic process that activates his brain and gets his creative juices flowing.

Landscape Diptych, Acrylic on canvas, 30″ x 80″, 2018

Berry's words prompted me to examine my own creative process. When I paint, I take memories of places I've visited and synthesize them on canvas into something new. As I work on a painting over time, areas get changed, painted over, and sometimes wiped out-though since I work in fast drying acrylic what gets painted in pretty much stays put. Sometimes, I'll take a painting that I am not happy with and put it out of sight, banishing it to the basement. Months later I might pass in front of it and get the urge to go back into it. It's not even necessarily a visual impulse. I bring the piece back from its exile and start working on it again. I don't gesso over it, rather I use the imagery that is already there, incorporating the original into the completely new painting that results. Now there are layers of history in that painting and rather than suppress them entirely, I often let those layers show through. I will do this even when working on a completely fresh work. In painting, "the visible trace of an earlier form" is called a pentimento, Italian for "regret". I don't think of these traces as regrets, however. I think of them as archeology and view the painting as a palimpsest, rather than a series of pentimenti. The painting becomes a document of choices, of history, and of process which I believe ultimately makes for a visually richer and more mysterious work.

Mountain Series Paintings by Pia De Girolamo

During the past several years I have been traveling in mountainous regions and places with dramatic geological formations. I love being in these places. The key word in that sentence is "being". All the senses are engaged as I pocket smooth stones, sketch a mountain, smell the thyme and clover, taste the tartness of wild plants and listen alternatively to the sounds of nature as well as its silence. When I go hiking and climbing, exhilaration arises both from the physical effort as well as from acknowledging fear and overcoming it. The body hums with the energy of exertion and alertness. I do not challenge nature, rather I challenge myself.

In the studio, I began exploring what made these mountainous places beautiful and mysterious to me and embarked on an ongoing series of paintings in which massive forms, the surrounding emptiness, and the sense of gravity dictated how I used color and shape. The raw and elemental sculptural forms of nature that seem to stand immutably also embody the unseen forces that have created them, and are also continually reshaping them. Nothing is static here and time flows on, albeit at mountain speed, rather than human speed.

The sense of being in the moment and acknowledging the physicality of the act of painting is a touchstone that informs my studio practice, and thus mirrors my experience of being in the outdoors. I work from memory, referring occasionally to my travel sketchbook, photographs, and smaller preparatory sketches to guide the creation of the painting. Though I may start with a general direction I leave myself open to big changes as I paint, much like planning a route ahead of time through a wild place and having to revise and reroute as unexpected obstacles arise. I leave room for chance and intuition to enter into the process. The paintings evolve, and while some refer to real places, others spring from composite memories of shapes or vistas.  All are a record of what is for me of the essence in these landscapes, whether they are in Iceland, the Canadian Rockies, or the American Southwest.

MOUNTAIN SERIES PAINTINGS by MP De Girolamo

Mountain Haiku I:

I am small. They're big.

Why do I love these giants?

I can see for miles.

  I continue to focus on mountain landscapes in my paintings. Most recently I visited Santa Fe for the first time and did a lot of hiking in the beautiful wild countryside there. I did a lot of sketching from life and re-read Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop, which is as much a visual work of art as it is a verbal one, and after which, it seems almost trite to say that the landscape is inspiring.

The work shown here is a mix of mountains from various places: I'll let you assign your own locations. My focus is on the interaction of shapes, lines, colors and feeling rather than the accurate depiction of a specific place.

  Mountain Haiku II:

 We're all mountaineers.

Our lives are peaks and valleys.

Mountain Landscape Insights

In my last blog post I spoke about a series of mountain landscape paintings that I've been working on for more than a year now.  I work from memory and refer only occasionally to photographs or to my travel sketchbook. I use the forms and colors of these landscapes to create a more or sometimes less abstracted version of these special places.

I love being in the mountains, exploring the woods and experiencing the power of waterfalls and rivers. The key word in that sentence is "being", I think. It is in this kind of environment I can most fully "be". All the senses are engaged as I pocket smooth river stones, sketch a mountain, smell the thyme and clover, taste the tartness of wild plants and listen alternatively to the sounds of nature as well as its silence. 

The body hums with the energy of exertion and alertness. Hiking, climbing, and balancing induce exhilaration both from the physical effort as well as from acknowledging fear and overcoming it. I don't challenge nature, rather myself.