Homage to Gottardo Piazzoni

Live drawing performance in the Piazzoni Room at the M.H. de Young museum in San Francisco, CA.

five charcoal sketches, 3' by 5', done in 3 hours.
(part of the event "illusion5 - fuera del barrio / beyond our block" curated by René Yañez and Adrián Arias, September 16th, 2006)

See photos below.

The Piazzoni room performance was introduced as follows:

"Mona Caron will be creating five landscape studies depicting the place of origin of painter Gottardo Piazzoni (1872-1945), whose California landscape murals are housed in this room of the museum.

SF muralist Mona Caron was born and spent the first two decades of her life in the very same small mountain village (Intragna, pop. 800) where Piazzoni was born. Both artists, almost exactly one century apart, emigrated from there to San Francisco, where they both became mural artists.

The serene California landscapes of Piazzoni's murals, characterized by their horizontality and sparseness, stand in complete contrast to the extreme verticality of the topography in his native land, the Centovalli region of the italian-speaking part of Switzerland.

Mona will be working on five landscape sketches showing the memory of home that she shares with Piazzoni. The memories are all views of Intragna, of the deep canyons surrounding the hill on which the village is perched, along with the seven old bridges that lead to it."

Photo captions:

Gottardo Piazzoni's ocean and hills murals (completed in 1932 for the old main library):