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Calum McClure has made paintings based on places and ideas from his new home in Italy. During the process of moving there he began reading the works of Italo Calvino (to improve his Italian) the resulting series of paintings and monotypes take direct inspiration from images conjured by the author’s writings, in particular Marcovaldo. The book is a series of twenty short stories, the first of which takes places in the spring, the second in summer, and so on for five complete cycles of the calendar. Calvino’s eponymous Marcovaldo is depicted as a man with a rural background now living with his wife and children in a large city. The painting Dov’è più azzurro il fiume? (Where the river is bluer?) takes its title from one of the book’s chapters. As with many of his other escapades Marcovaldo’s will to pursue the activities of the countryside in the city does not end well, and the beautiful blue river, on the city’s confines, where he attempts to fish tench, turns out to be down river from a polluting paint factory. In this oil we see McClure blending different types of brushstrokes, free flowing ones which suggest nature and tighter more ridged ones which could suggest the built environment.
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