As a birthday gift for my wife, I recently finished this painting of one of our favourite backwaters in Venice. Every so often, we treat ourselves to an off-season visit to the city. January is the best time. The weather is bright and crisp, you can get great service in the quiet restaurants, and the canals and alleyways aren’t clogged up with day-trippers brandishing selfie sticks.
We go there to recharge our creative batteries with a generous input of the ol’ dolce vita. I won’t rehearse all of the oft-stated reasons why Venice is such a fantastic place to do this. If you’ve been, you already get it; if you haven’t, you’ll get it if you ever do.
But painting this piece, and the memory of relaxation and reinvigoration that it evoked, got me thinking a great deal about creativity, ideas, and the circumstances necessary to allow creativity and ideas to happen.
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