San Marco Façade, Venice, 9 x 12 inch ink drawing by George C Clark AVAILABLE
Here's a real blast from the past! I recently found this little drawing in an old file I hadn't opened on decades. It was originally a page from the book of heavy Canson paper in which I began my series of on-site "Traveler's Sketchbook" watercolors when my wife and I were touring Europe by train in the late summer and fall of 1976. The watercolors I did on that trip are mostly long since sold, but in those early days I was only showing watercolor paintings in my exhibitions and this drawing got filed away never exhibited. Ten years later I began working sometimes in the medium of ink and watercolor for this series. In the last decade as my mobility has declined I have begun doing ink drawings on-site and adding color at home, or sometimes exhibiting the ink drawings without color.
For this drawing I did the light linework with a Rapidograph technical drawing pen with a no.1 or no. 0 point. The heavy blacks were added with a Sharpie felt-tip pen. I just looked at a blown-up map of the Piazza San Marco to determine that I did the drawing at one of the outermost tables of the Caffe Quadri's outdoor seating. This Caffe has been there since the 18th Century. It was expensive in 1976 and I understand the prices are even more outrageous today. However, I got a real kick out of sipping Campari-and-sodas at an establishment previously patronized by Casanova, William Dean Howells, Richard Wagner, Thomas Mann and Federico Fellini.
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