Our friend from ScalaColore, Stefi Cossu, invited me to participate in a group show the beginning of October, called (for some reason I never quite got) "Amore, Dove Sei?" or "My Love, Where Are You?". 

I'd been doing some drawings from photos I took in Catullo Airport, shots of people coming and going in the Arrivals Terminal; wanted to use them as backgrounds for the comic I'm working on. The piece had to be big to fit the space, so I decided to blow these drawings up.

Again, I went with the lovely, firm cardboard of the pizza box. We always get pizza at this place near the English school; they know us well and were the source of the 400 pizza boxes we used in the Onirica show. I used the top and bottom of the boxes to cut out equal squares of roughly 40 cm.

Wanted to do a diptych so I divided two of my 8.5" by 11" sketches into 20 squares. The idea was to project the squares, one by one, onto the cardboard, tracing over the projected and enlarged line with brush and ink. When each square of cardboard was painted and lined up properly, you would end up with a piece about four feet by six.

Once I'd painted each square, forty in all, L. helped me glue them together with our linen strips and rabbit skin glue, creating two pieces of more or less six by four feet. I wrote the date Sunday October 26, 2008 on one of the pics., the day I got back to Verona after cleaning out Mom's house. No one'll know what it means, but I will.

The location for the show is the Verona Canoe Club. It's a funky indoor-outdoor space enclosed by old stone walls, with locker rooms for the club members, a covered picnic area, meters tall racks where the canoes and kayaks are stored, and a wide stone porch facing the river with steps leading down to the water. 

It's right where the ancient Roman Customs House used to be and I'm pretty sure some bits of it date back to those times. You get a great view of The Adige and the vibe is old and urban and pretty hip for Verona.

Lawren and I hang the show Sunday AM, October 4; the gig will run through the day and into the evening. L. really knows how to get it done, has great ideas for hanging and presentation.

We show up around nine PM. There's a decent crowd there and we have a good time. Fede comes by with Trifola the dog, also L.'s friend from the gym, Maria Francesca. I give out my usual stack of cards, chat with fellow artist Sante Starace who does the big painting at Osteria la Carega, bump into a smattering of Scala Colore folks. A good time, except they actually made me pay for beers, something that would never happen in the States.