I am Marco Bellini. I paint harbour towns after I leave them, when the light has had time to settle into something I can actually use. This one is Alfama from the 28 tram, looking through scratched glass at tiled walls and laundry lines, with the Tagus going copper below.
The thing about painting from a tram is you cannot paint from a tram. You get ten seconds of a lit window against blue tiles, then it is gone and you are looking at someone’s washing. So I took nothing but a photograph I knew would be useless, and painted it a fortnight later when the colour had stopped moving.
The tiles stay flat, the paint does not
Alfama is all azulejos—those Portuguese tiles that catch the low sun and turn every wall into a grid of reflected light. I wanted that grid, but I also wanted the knife, so I dragged ochre and cream straight across in ridges thick enough to cast shadows under a lamp.
The tiles themselves are flat. The paint is not. You can see every pass of the blade, and that is the gap between the place and the painting. Ruby called it motion, which I will take.
One window glows warm orange. That is the lit room I saw for four seconds before the tram turned, and it is the only part of this piece I would not change.
Copper does not photograph
The Tagus at dusk goes a colour that has never appeared in a photograph: somewhere between copper and rust and the inside of a peach stone. I have tried to match it six times in six different harbours, and this is the closest I have come.
Valentina noticed the contrast—warm window against cool tiles. That is the whole piece. Everything else is there to make those two notes sit next to each other without one of them lying.
The sky I kept almost white, because Lisbon’s evening sky is not dramatic. It is pale and it stays pale, and if you darken it for effect you are painting somewhere else.
Charlotte said tapestry, I say stack
Charlotte used the word tapestry, which I understand but would not have chosen. Tapestry suggests weaving, and I do not weave. I stack: terracotta, ochre, cream, one slug of paint on top of another until the thing has enough height to look like a wall in late sun.
This is Alfama from the 28 tram, painted with a knife two weeks after the ride, when I finally knew which orange I had been looking at. The laundry is there because it was there. The copper is there because I have been trying to paint that river for three years.
If you live with it, hang it somewhere that gets warm light in the late afternoon. It will not work in cool morning light, and it does not want a minimal room.
This is for: Someone who has been to Lisbon, or wants to go, and understands that a painting of a place is not the same as a photograph of it.
This is not for: A space that needs a smooth, quiet surface, or anyone who wants the tiles to look like tiles instead of knife-dragged paint.
Gallery-wrapped canvas, in 3 sizes — 12×16, 18×24, 24×32 in. Ships free within the continental US.
