Learning From Alleys

I've been painting a long series of vertical "cityscapes" of alleys. They're really more "villagescapes". This started after looking through old vacation pictures of a trip taken with Jill, Martha, Margaret and Pat to Portugal many moons ago. A shot of a village street in Evora around the corner from the Mr. Smart Bar seemed to have lots of painterly possibilities that I'd been avoiding in my landscapes of hillsides, trees and shrubs. This was a built space, with all sorts of angles, shadows, textures, colors, and lots of perspective drawing challenges.

One thing led to another, and soon I was scouring the web looking for reference images of other alleys. For a while I painted alleys in the Italian Riviera (somewhere I've never been):

There were a few others that might actually be France...

Then I was off to Morocco and Tunisia for more (amd a new high water mark for these):

And then I took a bit of a wander through Santorini, sometimes straying from alleys:

This has all been quite useful and instructive for me because of those built-in challenges but also because they're fairly easy to find, which means more time painting and less time looking for something to paint. But I have definitely learned that not every interesting photo makes for an interesting painting (at least in my hands), and that I still haven't eliminated the problem of unforced errors (like the problem sky in that last one).