You are moving away from the town at the exact moment it becomes worth staying for.
That is the contradiction Marco built into this one. The cable car has you partway up the hill above Kotor. The bay below has gone deep blue. And down there in the stacked terracotta and rose houses, the windows are coming on one by one.
Look for the one warm window
There are hundreds of lights in this painting. All of them cool, all of them roughly the same. Except one. Marco puts a single window in there that is warmer and brighter than everything around it, and once you find it you cannot unfind it.
He does this on purpose, in every harbour he paints. One lamp that just came on. Somebody home, somebody cooking, somebody who is not on a cable car going up.
The other decision is the height. Not the summit, not the waterfront. One stop up. High enough that the bay reads as water, low enough that you can still count roofs. It makes your stomach drop a little, in the good way.
The water is knife-dragged in thick ridges. As Ruby put it, the impasto knife work captures the depth and warmth of Kotor’s evening sky.
Getting it up there
It is canvas, stretched over solid wood an inch and a quarter deep, and it arrives ready to hang out of the box. One nail. No frame to buy, no glass, no framer’s bill you did not plan for. Matte, so a lamp or a window opposite gives you the bay back instead of a glare.
Most people go with the 16 x 20 in (41 x 51 cm) at $149 — the 12 x 16 is $129 and the 18 x 24 is $229. It is a high quality print of a digital artwork, made to order, which is the reason it takes up to ten business days. Shipping is free in the continental US.
One honest thing
This is a dusk painting. Deep blue water, dark hillside, warm sky. Hung in a bright white room full of chrome it will feel like a door left open onto somewhere else — some people want exactly that, some people find it heavy.
If you have stood on that hill, take it home. If you are still deciding, follow Marco and you will see the next harbour before anyone else — or go through the rest of what he has painted at printasso.com.
