I began working on “Savannah Procession” at my artist residency at ARTS Southeast in Savannah, GA in August and September 2025. I am delighted to share that I'm back in Savannah and able to finish the piece thanks to the Savannah College of Art and Design: I am an artist in residence here through their Alumni Atelier program for a couple months.
This painting is about 6 feet tall by 15 feet long in two panels. The project started off with a town hall style meeting at ARTS Southeast during which I invited folks from Savannah to come and spend time in conversation: what’s going on with you? what, in your view, is going on in the community/nation/world? how do you feel about it all? The pivotal question that helped determine the conceptual direction of the piece: what role are you playing in the community we're creating here on this canvas?
The conversation have run the gamut from desperation to hope, rage to acceptance to indifference. It’s been absolutely fascinating to have opened up my studio and work to this kind of collaborative approach to painting-as-storytelling and to begin to capture the zeitgeist on canvas.
The work you see here represents several weeks of preparatory work: conversations with each participant, sketching-from-life, photo shoots, compositional studies, laying-in of the drawings on the canvas, schematic acrylic underpainting;and 17 days straight of oil painting.
Newly stretched, I've begun to add figures and to refine passages. I ended my last residency with 11 sketches of people who hadn't made their way onto the canvas. There are many people who have come forward in the meantime to participate in the future. There’s the dream of continuing: for another few months, for a year, for another 20 meters.
A huge thank you to President Paula Wallace at SCAD, to the kind folks at ARTS Southeast, and to everyone who participated so far in the Savannah Procession project! To keep up with me as I continue this piece, sign up for my newsletter (scroll down).
About the Project “I’ve been intrigued by the theme of processions the past few years, initially inspired by the religious processions that happen with regularity in every village where I live in southern Italy. These processions recall ancient local practices of bringing gifts to the gods that once protected this area and mirror similar events in every culture. I started to imagine what a contemporary Savannah procession might look like...an assembly of characters moving together towards their to-be-determined destination. READ MORE about this work...
plein air paintings
Sometimes I go out into the field to paint and to gain inspiration for my larger works. These works are done in oil, mostly on specially prepared wood panels.
This series of paintings depicting various madonna figures began during my early years in a small town in the Vallo di Diano in southern Italy. It was hearing the names she goes by here that first piqued my curiosity: Madonna of the Oaks, the High Place, the Snow, the Pomegranate, the Rock, the Sacred Mountain; the Star….
a gift for Ariadne, 39x47" (100x120cm), oil on linen, 2017
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