Dispatch from Italy

it's a long one

Tomorrow I embark on a month-long artist’s residency in France (whaaat????) Yes you heard that right. I type this on the Ligurian coast, snacking on the remnants of yesterday’s enormous order of fried anchovies that I stowed in the minibar fridge (you will find fried seafood in my bloodstream). We have spent the last two weeks in Italy, mostly walking 12km a day sightseeing in Rome and Florence, fueled by bread and gelato, and falling dead asleep every day at 9pm (jetlag? age? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯). We are currently in the sit-and-do-nothing time by the sea that I planned mostly for my husband’s benefit and I’m secretly hoping we never have to leave.

i mean come on

I lugged a bunch of art supplies around italy that I’m intending to use at the residency, including a couple of huge empty sketchbooks, a roll of fancy coloured pencils, and these implements, which made the cut after a whole evening of agonizing:

not pictured: sailor fude de mannen fountain pen. what I am holding is a pencil sharpener shaped like a poo (an essential supply)

Anyway, here are some cartoons.

hot tip: it’s important to properly sleep before your 2 week holiday (we did not)

i got a questionable pre-vacation haircut but c’est la vie amiright

early vacation experiments with an ink cartridge that was NOT waterproof (in my Sailor Fude de Mannen pen). I switched out to the Kiwaguro cartridge, which mercifully is quite waterproof. Bella Barba is my husband’s new name

a very hot man sitting across from us on the train

Florence hotel

Uffizi Gallery cafeteria

attempting to paint the changing light at sunrise from our hotel room on the coast

one of the rare days we were feeling spry enough for a noontime drink

the day that it was too stormy to leave the hotel

While I was here, my Sketchpad feature about running was published in the Oct 30, 2023 issue of the New Yorker. It motivated me to go for a run in Rome, before it got too hot.

art, life, etc

I did a bit of museum sketching, but less than I thought I would. The galleries were enormous and ridiculously ornate, and I was generally too overwhelmed to stare at my sketchbook for long. I did do some sketching of the sculptures in Florence that are just on display for the public. I’ve saved those sketches and musings for a paid post, which will go up in the next couple of days.

Unavoidably on my mind for much of this trip, and the lead-up to it, is the inconceivable suffering in the Middle East and the rest of the world. The New Yorker published this Daily Cartoon of mine on the Monday after the start of the war, which didn’t feel like enough (and still doesn’t), but it was all I had in my brain for a long time.

I (and thus my cartoons) default to empathy and connectedness in times of unimaginable horror, because it sometimes feels like it is all that I have - WE are all that we have. My guiding light is that safety, peace, and joy starts with taking care of and protecting each other, learning from each other, acting on a local level. (I emailed my MP - from Italy! - to demand a ceasefire, and you can too)

I keep this quote around, from Samin Nosrat’s wonderful New Yorker interview - it helps to ground me when things feel too overwhelming.

I just turned forty. I’ve never had a lot of age-related anxiety or any sense that there’s some timeline I’m behind on. But I’ve been thinking, How do I want to be for the rest of my time in this place, where it’s just going to continue to get much more difficult for a lot of humans? And I’ve realized that I can’t think about this in terms of the whole world, or all the people following me on the Internet, or all the people who are going to read my book, because that has been paralyzing for me. I think what I need to do is think about it in terms of: Who lives on my street? Who am I near? How do we take care of each other? How do I make the small places and times feel good? And then the real question is: What can I learn from that, which I can then share with a larger group of people? And maybe that’s justification for, like, eating some tuna in the middle of the day.

Hoping with all my heart for more peaceful days ahead. See you on the other side of this residency.

<3 Zoe