I didn’t paint this in Kotor. I painted it a week after I left, when I could remember the ridge of light but not the clutter around it.
I’m Marco Bellini. I paint harbour towns after I’ve gone home, working from what stays with me when the details drop away. I keep coming back to the moment the sky goes one colour and the windows another—the instant a place switches from day to night. This piece is that instant on the funicular, halfway up the mountain, when you’re suspended between the blue overhead and the orange starting below.
The ridge is the cable line
The funicular runs up the face of the mountain on a single cable. I dragged the knife along that angle and left it raised. It’s the highest point on the canvas.
Everything else—the bay, the rooftops, the mountain falling into shadow—sits lower. The cable is the only thing climbing. Impasto gives you that. A brushstroke would have marked the line but kept it flat.
I left the town as stacked rectangles
Kotor’s old town is a grid of stone houses with terracotta roofs, each one a few shades different from the next. I didn’t try to paint the grid accurately. I stacked rectangles in ochre and burnt orange, one on top of the other, until they read as a town from a distance.
Up close they’re just blocks of colour with knife edges between them. Valentina called it luminous in her review. I think she means you can see the light sitting on the ridges, which is what happens when you don’t blend.
The blue is Prussian, dragged thin
The sky isn’t one blue. I started with Prussian and pulled it across the top third of the canvas with the edge of the knife, so it goes from dense at the top to nearly transparent where it meets the horizon. The bay picks up the same blue, darker.
By the time I was halfway up that cable the bay had gone from grey to this particular blue—cold, deep, the colour of water when there’s no sun left to warm it. Cable Climbing Blue is that fifteen minutes, no longer.
This is for you if you’ve ever been suspended between two places and wanted to stay there. It’s not for you if you want a postcard. The town is stacked blocks, the cable is a raised line, the whole thing is about transition. If you need the place to be accurate, this won’t work.
Gallery-wrapped canvas, in 3 sizes — 12×16, 16×20, 18×24 in. Ships free within the continental US.
