Bogliasco Giorni: Il Nostro Ultimo Giorno.......

We made the mistake of waiting to write this page until after we had left Bogliasco. The result is that we have stumbled onto some kind of mental block. We are sitting on the terrace of a hotel in Erbusco on Saturday afternoon.......and have a weird king of short term amnesia......or maybe it was the wine at lunch! In any case, we will do our best to piece this together. We now have to do Thursday and Friday. I suspect our discipline is waning.

Thursday started off as a very nice day. There were a few clouds, but for the most part we had sunny skies. We had breakfast (everyone a big quiet) and then tried to get a bit organized. We had a lot of packing to do, particularly in the studio. We are sending two banker's boxes of art supplies and books back by FedEx, so we had to get those all taped up and over to the office. Even with the payment arranged to my office account, the bureaucracy of international shipping was crazy. Ivana called FedEx directly and had things worked out in about 15 minutes.

Before lunch we went for a last walk down through the gardens to take some pictures of the surf. The rather temperamental weather of the past few days had stirred up some major waves. While we were down there, the clouds started to thicken and it was sprinkling as we got back to Villa dei Pini. We drifted through lunch and a rather uneventful afternoon. The weather worsened and it started to rain heavily around 3:00. It was probably good that we decided not to venture out. By dinner the laundry was done and most everything packed.

The spirit of discussion during the evening hours was cheerful, but somehow underlaid with a sense of sadness. I think we all wanted to make the last evening a memorable one. Ivana stayed well into the night and did not go back to Genova......staying with her brother in Pieve. We all reminisced a bit about the experience and kept cycling back to some of the wilder stories and memories. We finally had more than enough to drink and made it to bed by around midnight.

A beautiful start to the morning

Part of the clean-up included finding a few projects that we had not put on the blog yet. This isn't the whole stack, but a few that give a sense in the directions we are headed. It turns out that Ivana (the Foundation Director) also loves to paint and showed us a catalog she bought at a Turner show a few years ago. It is simply extraordinary work and has given us some new inspiration.

starting to pack

A Slow Walk Down to the Rocks

rose petals falling......during our time here the wysteria and spring roses have both arrived and departed!

This tablet of a book was cast into a bench that was made for a terrace in the lower level of the garden. Robin Robertson is a Scottish poet of our generation that was a fellow in 2009. We initially thought a couple of words were misspelled......but 'throught' means 'thrown aggressively' and 'skirr' means to 'move rapidly'. His poetry was heavily influenced by his upbringing on the Scottish coast.......apparently not dissimilar from Liguria.

This is the last picture we took from the room........a funny sense of both reality and reflection .....and the fantastic dialogue this building has with the landscape.