Buttnekkiddoodles

 
Looking up at the bluffs from the Etruscan Necropolis. We stayed at an BnB a block behind the tower on the crest. I first visited Orvieto as a 24 year old art student at The University of Texas in Austin. I’ve been yearning to return to my favorite Italian hilltop city. When Rome was sacked in 1527, the Pope took up residence here for some time.

A return to Rush Hospital Human Anatomy Lab after a three year hiatus due to the pandemic. Excited to be back at this remarkable facility thanks to the interest and generosity of Rush and Dr. Chris Ferrigno.

During the interim I contacted Coronavirus and lost my sense of smell. It’s been a year plus and I have regained a fraction of my capability to detect smells. As a result, the nostril shocking smell of formaldehyde was at a bare minimum. So, there’s an upside to infection???
Faber-Castell Pitt Artist Pens on Hanemühle Cappuccino paper.

Backhoes, bulldozers, cranes, & earth movers hauling mud and muck from the bowels of North Pond and reshaping the banks. The initial trauma of uprooting shrubs waterlogged trees dead stumps is giving way to a clear design as banks are cleared and the pond enlarged.
Had a nice chat with the owner of the company doing the heavy work. Hoping to get within the work barrier to nab some close ups of the equipment.
Fountain pen and Pitt Artist Pens on a Rhodia Dot Grid notebook.

Late afternoon at the evolving banks of North Pond. Got the mini earth mover and most of the landscape done when a workman came along, hopped in, fired it up, and rode off to the level the banks elsewhere. I was attracted to this scene because the tilt of the vehicle parked on the slope of the embankment looked as if it was slowly losing the battle with gravity.
Fountain pen and Pitt Artist Pens on a Rhodia Dot Grid notebook.

III In the back of a Land Rover and crashing up the snaking gravel roads and hair-pin, hair-raising turns of the marble quarries which pockmark the mountains of Carrara, Italy. Humans have been chipping and chopping away at the much treasured white limestone in these mountains for 2,000 years, removing 6% of the inherent prize to date.

The scale of the mining and extraction is difficult to convey in a couple sketches. There are 190 quarries in these mountains. In the drawing above, you can see openings to caves in the mountain, the interiors which can themselves be cavernous. The smallIsh looking shack in the lower right hand is itself a large shed where some of the cutting could take place and is much larger than the large trucks used to haul multi ton loads of marble down the mountains. The pile of rocks along the bottom of the drawing is the edge of a marble gravel road we took to tour the quarries. There is a precipitous drop just on the other side of the gravel pile and more than four hundred yards between that and the cutting shed you see below.

Drawn with various fountain pens, DeArtementis Ink, Pitt Artist Pens, on watercolor paper, Stillman & Birn sketchbooks.