“The whole ancient Sassi town seems to be moving, undulating, breathing like a living creature. It combines the immensity and strength of form and outline of Henry Moore with the fluid exuberance of van Gogh. Similar colors to Cézanne’s paintings, too, with those more subtle, flickery, restless forms of El Greco, and sudden Fauvist flashes of violent color when a line of washing radiates against the cream beige and golden unity of the Sassi. Even the pantile roofs possess a harmony of colors, darker, fire-burned versions of that golden bedrock clay from which they were formed. And as the sun, glittering now like hammered silver, surges brighter and hotter, the whole place begins to vibrate and radiate, and lines swirl and buckle, and the shimmer starts as the cold air from the canyon below rises up to be simmered in the day’s new heat.
It gets to the point where it’s not real anymore. I don’t know yet how this sketch will work. I’m trying to give the place form, unity, and structure, and yet it seems to want to disintegrate like a Bacon painting, or even one of those furious Kandinsky “women” works.
Now I can feel my hand rejoicing in its freedom, and I hardly dare look at the lines because it may all be an utter mess. But it feels so right and powerful, and I sense the town is looking right at me, talking to me, urging me to celebrate its utter uniqueness, its gloriously chaotic nature, and its wildness of spirit and form. Thing is–can I do it?”