Christine Webb: Eternal Lights - Rome 2023

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This exhibition marks my 10th solo exhibition with Art2Muse and to celebrate I have focussed on my wonderful return trip to Italy and Rome.

Having been unable to travel during the lockdown, I have been transfixed on many existential questions. In Italy where I had lived for so many years, I was able to return for the first time in three years to pack precious things and paintings, in case I was again, not able to return. It was disquieting. But as I turned my back on life there, the last gasp of summer revived me with a few exhilarating days in Rome to put it all into perspective.

When you look out at the panorama of Rome you see the grandeur and chaos of a well lived life. You feel the pulse of existence as thousand year old ruins, Renaissance domes and the power of the Church rise above the noise of traffic and ephemera of tourism.

As I walk through the streets and visit the museums I often reflect on other artists who were here before me and feel the awe, the joy, see the colour and light through their eyes.

Did Picasso view this Etruscan vase, did subdued shades inspire Giorgio Morandi and the bright sunset light of Amedeo Modigliani? And everywhere is the mythology of Giorgio de Chirico.

Here is where the greats Michelangelo, Leonardo and Raphael lived and breathed. I imagine myself relaxing, savouring the experience, comfortable in a chair at a table of delights.

Perhaps the fragility of the cane and sensuous shape echoes the fragility of my own impermanence while the view through the window, the magnificence, will never change.

Here I am in this room, full of my comforts, but through the window is an eternal life, perhaps just out of reach.

But the window is open and the door never finally closed. I, no doubt, will return.