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Statement:
Città-Italian Cities
Monotype Prints
This series is the culmination of my semester abroad in Florence, completed last spring with Studio Arts Centers International (SACI). It consists of 20 monotype prints, each of a particular monument or series of architectural elements from cities in Italy. This series was prompted by the advanced drawing course’s final project, creating a piece that was based on our experience in Florence and abroad as a whole. What SACI offers is unbelievable--the courses, field trips, and location were wonderful. Palazzo dei Cartelloni is just three blocks from il Duomo, the heart of the city. The professors on staff are phenomenal, especially Gary, Helen and Dario. The program encouraged us to take advantage of the city and school resources— they often reminded us of the fact that we had the Renaissance at our fingertips.
The school and Helen’s connections allowed us to travel across Tuscany, Umbria, Lazio, Emilia-Romagna, Marche and Campania to see the cities. On these field trips I sketched the foundations for my monotypes. While SACI’s trips and my own travels took me to nearly forty towns and cities in Italy. I cut the series to twenty images, choosing eighteen of the most prominent cities that I visited the longest.
Most of the images are civic or religious hearts of the cities, massive temples labored over by the Romans, churches and palaces designed by renaissance geniuses, or monuments silenced by the plague. All of the prints are of buildings, except for two: the bay of Naples and the Marble Quarry of Carrara. Of the images, six are not physical sites. Rather, they are architectural pastiches of city elements, like the stairs of Siena’s Duomo, or the Leaning towers of Bologna. All the prints strive to capture the cities past and present character, laid out in black and white.
With this series, I wanted to make something that would keep the abroad semester with me when I came back to the states. These images are documents of a memory, of 115 days— more honest than my photos, made by my hands and ink. Whether walking in a dream in Venice or hurrying through the tourist-choked Milan streets, these prints capture the feeling of being there. Just as the memories they were pressed from, they will fade in time, already their details become hazy.
Phil Lang
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I'm currently remaking some of these prints, Lucca has a new version, Siena, San Gimignano and Milano are next. Show actually runs from Jan 30- April sometime.
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