On Thursday 23 May, as part of the painting course reserved for first-year students, the workshop “Acque Scure” (Dark Water) will be held, curated by the lecturer Fabrizio Dell’Arno with the presence of Guido D’Angeli and Antonella Nardi. The workshop, sponsored by “Winsor&Newton” that will offer the necessary materials to students, is focused on the work of Victor Hugo, author of the novel Notre Dame de Paris, but also excellent painter.
The written word and drawing are a constant presence in the writer’s life, although he has always tried to confine his production to the private sphere. To Charles Baudelaire, who recalled the “magnificent imagination of his drawings”, Victor Hugo wrote: “I am very happy and very proud that you have a positive opinion of things that I call my drawings in pen. I ended up mixing pencil, charcoal, cuttlefish black, smoke black and all sorts of bizarre mixtures to be able to roughly render what I have in my eyes and especially in my mind”.
The workshop focuses on natural inks, dyes, incomplete inks, colored juices and lacquers, following the ancient recipe books dating back to the Middle Ages until the early nineteenth century. In this scenario, which then opens up to modern water-based graphic-pictorial techniques, the watercolour and inks of “Winsor&Newton” are experimented. The company is the historic English brand that produced the first damp watercolours in tubes, a revolutionary invention dating back to 1835.
