Building Investigation 12

Pizza from Il Bolognese

watercolor on blick board

4 3/4" x 7"

The Pizza from Il Bolognese piece was the twelfth sustained investigation of a series of 15 and I chose to "investigate" buildings from my childhood in Sydney that held meaning to me. This is now the second time I have painted Il Bolognese because I felt like I didn't do it justice the first time I painted it, and it was probably the most important out of all the buildings I have painted in this series. Il Bolognese was our family dinner place whenever we went out to eat. It was a few towns over and because my sister was little at the time, we would often go fairly early and I hadn't yet changed out of my school uniform. That is what gives inspiration for what the boy is wearing in the piece. In my last piece "Lanecove Fish Market" I used watercolor as well, but I noticed my painting was sloppy because I relied so heavily on using micron pens outline and re-do everything to my liking, this is because of the rowdy-ness of watercolor and its tendency to bleed. But I felt like I was using the pens as a crutch and it was negatively impacting my painting because I never use watercolor without pens (until now), so I wanted to work on painting with just watercolor with no line or structural support.

I wanted to continue with the same elements I have been focusing on lately, people, lines and bright color, however, I really wanted to bring back the powerlines and bright blue Australian sky as those have been re-occurring elements. I kind of just started on this piece after deciding on my composition, I briefly sketched out an outline of the kid and then I painted him first, before completing the background more than a week later. The restaurant itself is two parts, a dining room and a deli and bar, I decided to only paint the dining room because that's all I remember us visiting.

I needed to re-do this piece because I was not pleased with how the last painting of Il Bolognese was, it just seemed rushed and frankly disrespectful to a place where I have so many good memories. I wanted to do this with watercolor only as kind of an expirimentation as well as proving to myself that I could actually do it. The watercolor was very hard to control, and I love to layer my paintings so this was kind of difficult especially with the kid, as (white people) fleshy colors are not very strong and tend to not appear very strong, this is evident in his hand.