Adventures in keen observation with Rosanna Hardin Hall

Rosanna Hardin Hall (B.F.A. Painting '71) has worked within the realms of artist, teacher, and scholar for more than four decades.

After graduation, Hall honed her painting skills and techniques while traveling abroad, and later earned an M.F.A. from the University of Hawaii in 1990. She has worked as a journalist and art critic for the Santa Fe New Mexican, taught painting at three different universities, and authored a memoir, amongst many other achievements.

Read on for Hall's insights on capturing natural beauty, the importance of studying abroad, and her own brand of creativity.

HERRON: As a subject matter, you've gravitated towards historical gardens. What drew you to plein air painting and capturing the beauty of nature?

My interest in art history has led me on a long journey through classical Italian gardens. I've painted ancient Roman gardens in Pompeii, emulated 14 centuries earlier by the Medici in Florence and wealthy merchants in Venice along the Grand Canal. I've painted Roman villas with thousands of fountains.

HERRON: Is there a specific garden that you call your favorite?

HALL: Villa d'Este in Tivoli, just outside Rome, is the most dramatic garden where I have painted. The garden cascades down a steep hill with stately cypress trees, pools with ancient gods as fountains, and dramatic jets of water reaching five stories high. The air is cooled by the many fountains and shades of trees. At top is the villa with balconies as lookouts over the enchanted garden. In the gardens, thousands of guests feasted, drank, and flirted.

HERRON: The Renaissance style is crucial to your scholarship. Why is it important to study artists that have come before you?

HALL: If I have any one important heritage in my art it originates in the High Renaissance, when Giorgione changed focus to landscape painting in 1500. During 12 painting trips to Venice to paint on location and study the period's materials and techniques, I discovered earth tones in paint especially well-utilized by Giorgione, whose tenets I observe I honor in my memoir, "Poesia: A Memoir of Painting in Venetian Gardens with Giorgione."

He drew with his brush, making changes as he developed a composition. He was a good draftsman, and his work led to a greater sense of reality in nature. He is what I call a poetic painter based on his tonal colors that create a sense of light. His paintings became obtuse. In "The Tempest," unexplained content and motives create poetic mystery inspired me to want to solve the age-old quest for beauty. That quest is "Poesia."

I studied painting with Robert Berkshire and Robert Eagerton, figure drawing with Harry Davis, sculpture with David Rubin, and photography and design with David E. Thompson. I learned 20th-century fundamentals of materials and techniques of oil painting, lithography, figure drawing, and sculpture.

By my senior year, I experimented with paint application. One process was to pick up oil and turpentine floating in large baths of water on canvas surfaces. This process created a marbleizing ground of abstract color shapes to suggest new inner forms in trees. This freed me to overpaint subjects in nature with more freedom of shapes and color. I discovered prismatic color compositions inspired by French Impressionist artist Claude Monet in his water lily series.

HERRON: Your memoir details your adventures while studying abroad in Venice and Sorrento, Italy. What prompted you to keep track of these experiences through journaling?

HALL: Because the Italian Renaissance began in Florence, I enrolled in the Florence Academy of Art. There, I found a deeper love of the fundamentals of painting. I recorded my life and painting experiences based on careful observation of lines, space, values of shadow and light in figure drawing. I also purchased earth pigments and began to mix my own pigments with linseed oil.

The next summer I enrolled in the Pratt Institute's summer program in Venice to learn in greater depth the materials and techniques of the Renaissance. I turned to my journals each day to record research in libraries and painting en plein air.

A trip to Sorrento to study with the Maryland Institute College of Art's summer program was the most surprising adventure. We went on a field trip to nearby Pompeii to see the ruins left by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79. I picked up a small journal to sketch places I wanted to return to paint en plein air. I found the shadows in indoor gardens against ancient architecture so intriguing that I commuted each day from Sorrento to Pompeii. All this time of thought and painting is recorded in my journal.

"Poesia" is based on these three post-graduate programs and several other visits to Venice, and I have transcribed over 50 journals. I hope my adventures might be inspiring to other artists.