In the summer of ’23 I visited the cities of Bologna and Venice. As an architecture student I was excited, but not for any particular buildings. I loved the maze-like alleys in Venice (outside the tourist area) and the colonnades and secluded gardens in Bologna. Both cities are filled with sculptures, crooked passages and sunny squares.

I wanted to experiment with those public spaces in a drawing depicting both open and more secluded areas. But how? I loved the idea of looking through porticos and between things and letting the spectator discover small details in the distance. To lure the onlooker into the image, I added characters of different levels of exposure: the one playing with the dog is the most prominent, and looking at them you will notice the woman and her cow positioned in between but further away. Looking at the man with the bottle and the stick, you may notice the man in the door opening at the back, the person he’s looking at and the fallen cabbage cart (Avatar reference intended). Looking at the dark figure on the right you immediately see the girl next to him carrying produce to sell, and the market stall behind the arch.

There’s a lot more happening, and each time you look at it, something different will catch your eye, making it a perfect fantasy to look at on your wall.

As you can see on the sketches on the right of this page, I started out with sketching a bunch of kids around a portico, before moving on to design the environment with its changing urban landscape. I fell in love with it, committing myself to work on A3 and spending tow weeks on the final ink drawing.

About a month after finishing the piece I read a passage in Invisible Cities that made me think of it. Maybe it will spark some thoughts in you:

Beyond six rivers and three mountain ranges rises Zora, a city that no one, having seen it, can forget. But not because, like other memorable cities, it leaves an unusual image in your recollections. Zora has the quality of remaining in your memory point by point, in its succession of streets, of houses along the streets, and of doors and windows in the houses, though nothing in them possesses a special beauty or rarity. Zora’s secret lies in the way your gaze runs over patterns following one another as in a musical score where not a note can be altered or displaced. The man who knows by heart how Zora is made, is he is unable to sleep at night, can imagine he is walking along the streets as he remembers the order by which the copper clock follows the barber’s striped awning, then the fountain with the nine jets, the astronomers glass tower, the melon vendor’s kiosk, the statue of the hermit and the lion, the Turkish bath, the café at the corner, the alley that leads to the harbor.

This city which cannot be expunged from the mind is like an armature, a honeycomb in whose cells each of us can place the things he wants to remember: names of famous men, virtues, numbers, vegetable and mineral classifications, dates of battles, constellations, parts of speech. Between each idea and each point of itinerary an affinity or contrast can be established, serving as an immediate aid to memory. So the world’s most learned men are those who have memorized Zora. But in vain I set out to visit the city: forced to remain motionless and always the same, in order to be more easily remembered, Zora has languished, disintegrated, disappeared. The earth has forgotten her.

- Italo Calvino in Invisible Cities

Interested in buying a print of this artwork? You can get it here on my Etsy page: