"Rainy Night at the Piazza della Repubblica"- soft pastel on charcoal gray paper
- approx. 11.7x16.5"/297x420mm
Raindrops wash down from an inky sky, an endless cascade of tiny, dazzling droplets shining brightly as they fall past the lights of the piazza.
They dash to the paving stones only to splash up in a last leap skyward before settling back to the ground to find somewhere else to run off to.
Umbrella-topped pedestrians pick their way across the open space, unsure if the next puddle is a deep one, hoping it isn't.
Around the square, waiters inside wait as tables outside wait out the weather.
And you are here. And I am here beside you in the rain. And we are happy.
--Mark Ivan Cole
***
I really stretched with this particular painting! It's my first-ever street scene; I've done pencil sketches here and there, but nothing this ambitious or colorful. I laid out everything on a grid to help me get the drawing right. I did a little smearing on the sky and the building in the upper left, and I occasionally "pounced" a fingertip to soften a mark, but most of the strokes I left as they were laid. I let the painting sit for a couple of weeks, and then did a few corrections. The poem was written as I was thinking about my wife and myself walking across the Piazza della Repubblica in Florence, happy to be in Europe for the first time, together, regardless of the weather.
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