“Packing" - 61 Project

Last year, one of the painter's who went on my workshop to the Amalfi Coast took a fabulous photo of a muleteer and his pack animals. They were walking down the steps in Maoiri, one of the towns we visited on the coast. Silvia graciously gave me permission to work from her photo.

I love painting animals. There's a challenge in describing the textures  like the soft muzzle verses the courser body hair, just by using paint. 

My grandfather had mules in Italy. They helped with the farm work, and carried the firewood down off the mountain that was used for heating and for cooking.

One summer, I was staying at my grandfather's house and you know how sometime's you walk into a room and it doesn't smell so great? Well, being polite, you don't want to mention it, right?  I would immediately go to the window and unlatch it. For the longest time, I couldn't figure out why the bathroom always smelled worse when I opened the window...

Then I discovered that under the bathroom was the stall where the mule lived. In old farmhouses, the animal pens were on the ground floor. There was a kitchen on that level also, and the cantina where the wine was kept. All the bedrooms were on the second level (Italians call that the first floor). 

When I painted this mule, I transported back to that moment when I discovered where that smell was really coming from.