Virtual Paintout in Sardinia

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Via Verdi in Talana

Watercolour and crayon

©2011 Charlene Brown

The Virtual Paintout is in Sardinia this month.  As you may have noticed, I love painting landscapes that include mountains, so I first searched out a location in Google Satellite view.  This is my favourite of the many mountain and sea views I found in a very short time.  Here is a link to it. 

I’m taking a short break from posting the paintings I did on our European river cruise…  I'm posting them chronologically, with the next one up being from Dürnstein in Austria, and I’m waiting for a postcard I painted at the same location to appear on A Postcard From My Walk so I can show the two pictures at the same time.

Not your average 'Turrets and Domes' tour of Europe

 Incinerator and turbines

Watercolour, crayon and marker

©2011 Charlene Brown

The orderly (and beautifully painted) series of turrets and domes I had envisioned from our river cruise in Europe went off on a tangent in Vienna. I became fascinated with the work of Friedensreich Hundertwasser, a fabulous painter whose work covers several buildings around Vienna, such as the garbage incinerator/district heating plant, Fernwärmewerk Spittelau, I’ve painted here.  In case you’re wondering, it was only when he was promised that the plant would be equipped with the most modern emission-purification technology and that 60,000 apartments would be heated, thus making Vienna's air cleaner, that Hundertwasser, an ardent environmentalist, agreed to do the design. I’ve added some wind turbines, seen on the way out of town on a side-trip to Bratislava, Slovakia, to complete the picture.

The adventure begins...

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The view from our ship

Watercolour and crayon

©2011 Charlene Brown

Before we began our cruise from Budapest to Amsterdam, we were docked just downriver from the Hungarian Parliament and the famous Chain Bridge. To almost everyone’s surprise, the (notoriously brownish-green) Danube was actually blue for part of the time we were there!  (Not as blue as I’ve painted it, but pretty spectacular, nonetheless.)

This was the first of many wondrous and very paintable sights we were to see over the next two weeks. The resulting paintings didn’t exactly form themselves into the coherent series I had thought might result from this adventure... as you will see when I post the ones that underwent a kind of ‘ambush by Hundertwasser.’