I am Marco Bellini. I paint harbour towns after I leave them, working from what I remember rather than what I photographed. What I keep coming back to is the moment just after the lamps come on – that ten minutes when warm light meets cool air and a town looks like every Christmas you thought you remembered. This piece is Vernazza on Christmas Eve, and the lit tree is the wrong scale because that is how it felt standing there.
The tree earned its size
In the photograph the tree is modest, maybe two metres, tucked beside the boats on the slip. In the painting it is twice that, a vertical of warm gold against all that stacked terracotta. I made it bigger because it was doing all the work – the only thing moving, the only thing lit from inside, the reason anyone was standing outside in the cold looking at the water.
Ruby called the knife work heavy, and she is right. The paint is straight from the tube onto the blade, no medium, no thinning. The tree is built in ridges you can see from across the room, each one a separate stroke that stayed where I put it.
The boats are up because it is Christmas Eve
Every boat is pulled onto the slip and the water is empty. That is how you know it is Christmas Eve without needing to see the tree. I dragged the knife horizontally for the water, left to right in one pass, so the reflected lights sit in grooves and catch actual light when you walk past the painting.
The houses are stacked the way they always are in Vernazza – ochre, terracotta, cream, each one a separate plane of colour that stops where the next one starts. The unblended join where two colours meet is visible in every window, every roofline, every boat hull. Charlotte called it a beguiling glow. I call it the thing that happens when you do not go back over it.
This wants a wall that gets evening light
The piece is mostly cool – deep blue sky, blue-grey water, violet shadow on the cliff. The warm notes are small and loud: the tree, the windows, the terracotta catching the last of the day. It needs a room that gets warm light in the evening, or it will read cold.
This is for someone who has been to the Cinque Terre, or wants to go, and does not mind a painting where the tree is the wrong size. It is not for a minimal space or anyone who wants the paint to sit flat.
Gallery-wrapped canvas, in 3 sizes — 12×16, 18×24, 24×32 in. Ships free within the continental US.
