Drawing Sorrento: the honeymoon period

I had spent the winter of 2004-5 longing to go to Italy but for one reason and another was unable to leave England. My decisions about changing my life had awakened in me a kind of manic behaviour that led me to forget to eat between meals, to eat half of my normal diet in fact, and to exercise regularly, a kind of limbering up for what I wanted to do. I had feelings that took me back to being a teenager – a rebellious one – and I was determined to go back to Sorrento – just like the song – but by myself.

I hadn’t flown on my own for many years. It was a revelation to me of how sad and impotent I was in danger of becoming when I found it quite a struggle to remember how to check in at Gatwick. But once I arrived in Naples and at one o’clock in the afternoon took the bus again to the centre of Sorrento, my confidence came flooding back, despite my having been travelling since half past three in the morning.

It was early April, the Easter holidays. The weather was bright and cool and windy as I got off the bus in the Piazza Tasso. I was greeted immediately by a smiling young Italian. He led me round the corner of the Piazza into the Via San Francesco, where I had booked an apartment. The apartment faced on to the little street where a constant procession of scooters, cars, vans and tourists passed within a few inches of the building. Alessandro showed me the apartment, right on the street side with a tiny balcony overlooking the bustle below. I would enjoy the view, said Alessandro.

Even Alessandro – a very charming and persuasive man – could not convince me that I would get a wink of sleep in this room, and so he showed me, hesitantly, the alternative, facing a silent building site. A building site? I questioned. Oh no, he said, there won’t be any noise – they’ve run out of money to go on with the work. And I believed him and settled into this Spartan – but very clean and – yes – he was right – absolutely peaceful apartment, for the next week.

I had come to draw Sorrento and I set up a working routine straight away. In the mornings, I would go out and get bread, fruit and croissants and have a walk round the centre of the town, getting my bearings and deciding where I would perch myself to draw for that day. In the afternoon I would have a rest in my quiet apartment and continue the morning’s drawing from memory. And in the evenings I went out to explore the restaurants and piazzas that were buzzing with life till midnight. Sorrento is a very safe town. I never felt ill at ease on my own there – though I was an object of pity for the gregarious Italians, I knew.

In my morning forays out I chose my subjects on visual, compositional grounds, rather than looking for the most popular tourist sights. I didn’t have any clear plans as to what I would do with my pictures at this time.

Drawing has always been something I just do, particularly when I’m in a new place. It’s to do with a feeling of wanting to own what I see. Picasso (with whom I would not have the nerve to compare myself in any other way) seems to have had a similar feeling about the power of the artist’s gaze. I have been rereading parts of John Richardson’s vast biography of him and find this: discussing two watercolours of Picasso’s intended lover Fernande asleep, showing her watched by two different men. Richardson writes that he believes that Picasso painted these in an attempt to persuade Fernande to become his lover rather than stay with the sculptor Debienne:

Picasso’s eyes seem to exert a strange power: the mirada fuerte power to conjure Fernande from the bed of the weak watcher into the arms of the strong watcher.
(“A Life of Picasso Volume 1 1886-1906” published by Jonathan Cape (1991) - page 317)

I had no such erotic motivation but I wanted to express my delight in being there in that week, in that cool bright windy Mediterranean town, by capturing the sights in front of me.

So having decided on my location for the day’s work, I would settle down on my folding stool and begin.

First a detailed pencil drawing using only line – I was working on a pad of watercolour paper just a little bigger than A4. This would take anything up to an hour and a half.

Next, I took waterproof ink and a mapping pen with a flexible nib and drew over the pencil, changing it, emphasising the important details and structures and suppressing the superfluous details. I added people who passed by, if they caught my eye and imagination. I built the picture gradually. Then I erased the pencil marks.

Now I could go into colour. With watercolour I touched in washes of yellows greys, ochres, gingery reds, blue and mauve reflecting from the sky into the shadows – for almost the first time I appreciated why that creamy yellow is called Naples yellow, and the difference between that and the harsher earthy colour of yellow ochre. Venetian red and umber – all those so-Italian names, in thin washes. The white paper ricochets the light back through the layers and the colour glows luminously.
Final touches were made with the pen and a very small brush – size 00




This was the first outdoor painting that I made, that cool April week. I was sitting outside the Bar Fauno, the big café-restaurant that dominates the Piazza Tasso. The 17th Century Chiesa delle Carmine, the baroque church on the corner, caught my eye with its flamboyant decorations and peeling Naples yellow stucco. Inside, it is used as an art gallery.

There is a constant flow across the wide piazza, of people of all ages and many nationalities (in August many of them British, at Easter and in October many Americans, as well as Germans, Dutch, Australian, French, Scandinavian, East European and of course Italian tourists.) It’s a popular place in the evenings and the Chiesa delle Carmine looks splendid in its floodlighting.

That first morning in Sorrento solo, my pen traced the arabesques of the carvings and the mobile, voluble figures of the Italians and tourists meeting and chatting in the piazza, and I was absolutely happy.

In the centre of the swirling traffic is a statue of a pope or saint whose name I forget. I think it is Saint Anthony – he has the crook and mitre that show he is a figure of high standing in the church. The square is named after Torquato Tasso (1544-595), the famous poet who was born and lived in Sorrento and whose house you can find in one of the quiet back streets leading down to the Marina Grande.


I found it very difficult to photograph the statue in the centre of the Piazza Tasso because you risked life and limb to cross the road nearby, let alone stopping to take a photo……









I am always struck by the lovely lines of the wrought iron street lamps in Italy. I do attract some funny looks from Italians particularly when I go round the streets with my neck craning upwards at the lamps and the carving, too, over doorways and windows and on balconies.









I found my next subject by walking along the Via degli Aranci and through the ruined Roman city gate arch that leads back to the Corsa Italia which is the main shopping street in Sorrento.


On the pavement outside the Duomo, I found a water-fountain made of bronze, still used by passers-by and by the occasional dog who licked up the drips from the stone work around it. I am told that this fountain may not be very ancient (perhaps only 200 years old) but it had a character that made me stop and look, set up my stool and draw it.



This was later expanded into a large gouache painting that I am still working on – the figures in that rather dreamlike picture have gone through various transformations over the months.

“Drinking Fountain, Corsa Italia”

This version has no figures. I have also varied the colour of the building behind the fountain recently and put in a figure, which will have to be removed, I fear. Begun in January 2006, it is still a work in progress in January 07.

It was a bright fresh April day in Sorrento when I painted the little watercolour sketch of the drinking fountain. It was cool but I was wearing sunglasses when I began the drawing. As always when drawing outside I found myself periodically surrounded by admiring children.

Italian children are among the most polite and charming in the world, I have found. With my smattering of Italian I was engaged in conversation by a group whose comments to each other and me of “Bello! Bellissimo!” were apparently heartfelt. They tried to ask me questions but gave up, all except for one little boy of about 8, who not only managed to make me understand that he wanted to know what I intended to do with my picture when it was finished, but went off and got his father to look at it.

Tactfully, his father assured his son that I would have no intention of selling the work. It was only later that I realised that he was protecting me from making statements that might get me into trouble with the police. Art sales in Italy are heavily taxed and you are not allowed to sell in the street. But, as another artist, in Positano, assured me later, no–one can stop you painting in the street.

It was while I was painting there outside the Duomo that I had my first and so far only experience of bad behaviour in Sorrento. Having put my sunglasses down next to me when I began applying colour to the picture, I was suddenly surrounded by teenagers – apparently interested in my picture – but when they had gone my sunglasses went with them! That was a lesson I needed to learn.

My next stake-out was at the Mona Lisa restaurant in the old part of Sorrento. This café is right opposite the Sedile Dominova, a Roman building that is still a meeting place for Sorrentinos to read their newspapers and chat. A friend who was born and brought up in Sorrento told me that it was originally a meeting place for Roman women to meet, and the name refers to that, in Latin – the ladies’ sitting place.

On this first occasion I was not looking at Sedile Dominova, but at the campanile of the Duomo, up the street next to it. This year the tower has been undergoing repairs but when I painted the picture below it was a lovely sight. Classically proportioned tiers of brick, rusticated stone, marble and plaster arches frame a graceful Madonna, the bells and at the very top a beautiful blue and gold faced clock.

Too late, I realised that I could not include the clock – I had become too interested in the shoe shop and the scooter in the foreground and had no room! I decided to make another drawing to include the top of the Duomo, later on.

The waitresses at the Mona Lisa were very surprised by my activities with pen and watercolour but very patient and flatteringly interested in my drawing. The little paintings took me two mornings to complete, so I drank rather a lot of coffee and ate lots of the delicious petits fours that they served with it – not cheap mornings but very pleasant. When I went back, in the summer, the same waiters were there and I was able to continue exploring in watercolour and ink this extremely old (though now very commercialised) cross roads in the “Historic Centre” part of Sorrento.

Here is my watercolour of the Sedile Dominova, looking directly in at the trompe l’oeuil paintings inside the apse-shaped hall. This one took me many hours of patient drawing before I began building up the layers of colour to show that patina that covered the aged stone pillars. Painting a painting is never easy either – some of the mouldings inside are solid and others are painted illusions by 17th century artists.

This painting was used by Givanni Petagna in his book about historic Sorrento, “Sorrento: Il Conservatorio di Santa Maria delle Grazie” which was published in 2006. This is an erudite history (in Italian) of the Conservatorio, in the Piazza S Francesco, a few yards from where I stayed on that first solo visit to Sorrento.

I visited Pompeii during that first week, too. My tonal drawing of one of the tall arches at the end of the Forum took me all day. It was a little laboured and reminds me of those 19th century illustrations to travel books. Apart from a surreal conversation with a large American surrounded by nervous Italian bodyguards who told me that I ought to recognise him – he was a world famous wrestler and he certainly looked it (his hair was dyed gold and he was dressed mainly in gold lame) this was not a memorable visit to what is a truly fascinating place. I have promised myself that I shall do Pompeii justice one day, but Sorrento had my heart that week in April 2005.