For me, painting Cetona right now is a little bit like transposing myself there. Which is a welcome para-psychic illusion. So, during this time of uncertainty and domestic and (now) national confinement, and, as often happens, my prolonged and grievous absence, I am grateful to have this inspiration for the work I am pursuing.

Among the many wonderful opportunities offered by painting is the sharpening of seeing: the re-visitation and examination of places we think we know intimately, and have taken for granted, but about which, on an optical level, we have missed a lot. Since I started painting some fifteen years ago, during my time in Cetona I have spent an inordinate amount of attention examining the ways walls curve and turn. Things that seemed clear even to me are not — even to my eye, which seems to record everything to the minute detail, like a camera, much more than words.

A piazza I thought to be normally rectangular turns out to be not so — which is not at all obvious. I love studying the maps and the aerial views and the new perception that all pictures give me. It is a constant re-evaluation of one’s sight and perception, but also of place. Even the corners you leaned against to kiss a boy every evening or the street you walked home every day unveils new details that change everything. Finally, the truth. Unveiled. Discovered.

The habitual — though exquisite, always exquisite — turns out to be constantly newly exquisite, or always new, though still extraordinary. Extraordinary and new. Not at all habitual. But, of course, we must always sharpen the habit of the mind and the eye.

What gifts we are given in these bodies — to see. To perceive.