The day after the fair I got a ride to the airport and flew to Florence Italy. I had just spent almost all of the last 5 years drawing, usually between 14 to 18 hours a day, so it felt great to get rid of my apartment and studio and leave. I packed some clothes, a few books, and enough art supplies to last a couple of months.
I didn't really take too many photos of Florence, my camera was acting funny, but we bought a disposable camera at some point, so I scanned some of those.... They look a little weird, I guess my scanner needs to be calibrated... Here's Carolyn, I think this is just down the street from our place...
You can see the mopeds on the left hand side, they are everywhere in the city. In Toronto I always thought mopeds were goofy looking, some dude speeds past you on one and you just want to clothesline him or something, but in Florence mopeds look all tough and badass somehow, I can't really explain it. Guys wear really feminine jeans there though, with eagles stictched into the butt and weird bleach stains and shit, I never really got use to that, its like a city of boyband members... I was talking to Carolyn a few days ago and she said that she got hit by a moped, it was bound to happen sometime, they tend to drive pretty crazy there. Luckily she's mostly OK.
Heres our place, it was huge, we shared it with two great guys from Carolyn's school, they were really welcoming to me... Carolyn took these photos when she first moved in there, a few months before I arrived, so its pretty empty looking...
Right across the street was the Specola, the oldest taxidermy museum in Europe, or maybe it is the largest, I can't remember. It was founded in 1785, most of the specimens are about 100 years old. Basically the place is a giant zombie-animal warehouse. The gums are rotted away and the eyelids are gross. In some cases wounds were not sewn up properly or fingers rotted away, so there are exposed bones. The place rocked my world, I got an open pass and drew in there almost everyday. Here's some photos from the museum:
And heres some scans of the sketches I made. I did lots of birds, I'm really getting into drawing them, I mightuse some of these for an upcoming Road of Knives page:
Carolyn set me up with a makeshift studio in the dining room. I played around with some acrylic and watercolour on paper and a couple of larger mylar pieces. Once I get that work scanned I'll post it on here...Hmmmmm...thats all I have to write about Florence. It was a great trip with lots of fun stories, but I won't type them out here, its not the same without photos anyway. Two months of relaxing, drawing, and thinking. Oh, we took a trip to Rome and Paris during Christmas, I'll post some pictures in the next (and hopefully last) recap...