I’ve been on a finishing roll, and I finally managed to finish a simple project I’ve been dragging around since 2001. Way back then we went on my dream vacation to Rome. In November even, so I got to wander around my dream city when it was rainy and crisp and glorious. We stayed in this little hotel right on the edge of an enormous park and scoured the city looking for all the artwork I had learned about in my Western Civ classes. Bear still teases me about my obsessive fixation with Bernini.
While strolling through one piazza or another, we came across a few booths with artists selling their work and snapped up this lovely little watercolor.
I love this piece, but the only problem is that it is such an odd size I could *not* find a frame for it. I looked at getting it custom framed but it’s just so very expensive and we have never been in a position where I could make that a high priority, so it’s been sitting, carefully, in the bottom of my work in progress drawer, only getting out when it was time to put it in a box and move to the next house where it went back in it’s drawer.
Whenever I’m at a thrift store, I always scout through the frames, hoping I’ll find something that just happens to be right. When I was up in Utah I found something that still isn’t perfect, but is close enough. It’s a few inches too long, and I wish it was just a little bit taller, but I’ll deal with the extra white space if it means I get to actually look at it instead of just squirrel it away.
It was a light blond wood, so I gave it a good sanding and painted it with Folk Arts enamel paints. This worked great! You get a good hard cure so it’s WAY stronger than acrylics, but you can save yourself the trouble of busting out the spray paint.
This hangs in my studio just above my ironing board, and I’m wondering how long it will be before I burn something because I’m too busy staring at it. It was those two tiny people walking through the arch that really captured my imagination, and it brings back such sweet memories of walking through an ancient city hand in hand with my love.