Theresa Thompson delights in an exhibition on the Woodstock Road

With his sights set firmly on Rome, in his classic memoir Italian Journey the poet Goethe gives only a few pages to Tuscany. Yet for many today Tuscany is considered to be the very essence of Italy, its rolling hills, olive groves, vineyards, villas, lines of cypress trees, and picturesque hilltop towns, evoking a picture of warmth, ease and indefinable beauty.

Goethe admitted struggling at times for words to describe landscape “of an indescribable beauty,” suggesting too that “we ought to talk less and draw more”.

Hyperbole maybe from someone entranced by nature’s beauty on a journey of a lifetime, but looking at Tuscan artist Paolo Gheri’s watercolour landscapes on display at St Anne’s College, Oxford, it seems that something of that spirit lives on.

Neither words nor reproductions do justice to some artworks. Paolo Gheri’s watercolours are sparse, deceptively simple landscapes executed in soft washes that hint at a deep respect for the subtleties of a landscape.

Sunlit scenes, whether of San Gimignano’s towers blithely reaching to the sky on a far horizon, or a patchwork of fields where rose-coloured rooftops peer over a treeline, painted with colours as gentle as the Tuscan hills, a touch as fluid as the medium, these are works imbued with a love for a landscape that needs little explanation.

Gheri, born in Florence in 1940 and now living in the countryside near Siena, doesn’t try to explain his home region; he just offers it to us, unclutter-ed, evanescent, and full of feeling. The 30 or so watercolours exhibited here are largely Tuscan landscapes, some painted fairly recently. All are for sale.

Recalling how the exhibition came about, Professor Zancani, Emeritus Professor of Italian Literature at the University of Oxford, said, “Nearly a year ago I approached Tim Wilson who is also a Fellow of Balliol College to ask his opinion about Paolo Gheri’s work, which I liked very much, and ask his advice about the possibility of mount-ing an exhibition, either in London or in Oxford. Now, we are nearly there!”

Prof Zancani said: “Gheri’s water-colours were appreciated by Professor Wilson, of the Department of Western Art at the Ashmolean Museum. He described them as ‘very un-Italian’.” I asked the artist, in Oxford for the show’s opening this week: was there anything special about these specific landscapes?

Taking two examples, Landscape near Medane, and Landscape with trees, he replied: “There is nothing particular in the landscapes them-selves. They are all quite near my home, most of them belong to the Sienese ‘crete’, and therefore I am very familiar with them. But for Landscape near Medane, I would like to say that the light was rather special when I painted it. It was quite early in the morning and the light produced by the rising sun looked quite fascinating, and I liked it very much. Therefore this is a painting I am particularly fond of.

“I prefer natural landscapes to urban landscapes. In this exhibition there are very few images of Siena or other Tuscan towns or villages. Watercolour is a technique which obviously involves water, and sometimes the ultimate effect is not what one was looking for. In the case of Landscape near Medane, I enjoyed the relative speed with which I had to paint, to capture the light and the main features of the land-scape, without going back on what I had done, with a certain immediacy, urgence, and with speed of brush.”

Oxford Mail:
Landscape near Medane

Some views show the unique ‘crete Senesi’ land-scape south of Siena, some a particular location such as Chianti Hills (Radda) or the view to San Gimignano. Others are more general scenes like Landscape with trees. Gheri said: “I rarely paint trees; there may be grass or just different types of land in my paintings. But on this occasion the tree tops seemed to have come out part-icularly well, they were satisfying, and yet there was an element of chance.”

Now retired, Gheri was a headmaster in schools in Tuscany and has taught art history and painting techniques to art teachers and adults. He lectures on the ‘reading’ of paintings, and has published books on art education. He has exhibited many times in Italy, including in Tuscany, Umbria and Sicily, and in England most recently at the University of Surrey, Guildford, and Aldershot.

With enduring pedagogical instinct, Gheri has studied the effect that different types of paper may have on the final work gives details of the paper used on the exhibition labels – a feature of the show that will no doubt please watercolourists. “My watercolours are based on real subjects which are, for me, a necessary starting point in order to study the shape, the light, and the mysterious relationships which seem to exist between different objects when they are put together.

“In my work I always tend to reduce and simplify the visible shapes of things and to free them, as much as possible... I sometimes try to eliminate, in successive stages, more and more detail...” No surprise then to learn that Gheri admires great Italian masters such as Piero della Francesca, and Giorgio Morandi’s sublimely understated art. Gheri’s own brand of understated art will appeal, I believe, to many viewers, not only the Italophiles amongst us. Who knows, we might all be persuaded to talk less and draw more.

Watercolours of Tuscany
Mary Ogilvie Gallery, St Anne’s College, Woodstock Road, Oxford
Daily, 10am-6pm until June 2, subject to college commitments Visitors are advised to enquire with the college lodge (01865 274800)