This year, I celebrated my birthday with a tableful of a dozen or so spirited strangers. When they merrily sang “Happy Birthday”, there was a mumble when it came to my name.
Within five days, however, we would not only know each other’s names, we would know one another’s children’s names and ages, aperitivo of choice, breakfasting habits, musical abilities and most of all, whether they knew their Crimson Lake from their Rose Madder or other shades of red.
My birthday coincided with my first night at the Arniano Painting School, a six-day course taking place at Palazzo Parisi, a 15th-century pile atop a hill in Lazio, an hour from Rome.
I had arrived at nightfall and was swiftly ushered on to the breezy loggia for a boozy ice-breaking dinner with my new painting companions, a disparate group of amateur painters who had flown in from Florida, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, New Mexico and France. One Russian couple from Gibraltar had driven all the way in their red Porsche. It was an overwhelmingly female gang, apart from one male doctor who came with his doctor fiancée — both return guests — and one non-painting spouse.
All had heard of Arniano from friends, or the painting school’s Instagram account, which promises “Dreamy week-long painting holidays” with romantic shots of Italian landscapes and tables laden with multiple salads and platters of Parma ham piled high.
Set up by two Britons, Amber Guinness and artist William Roper-Curzon, Arniano has been running for nearly a decade and has a firm following of devotees who return for Guinness’s terrific cooking and Roper-Curzon’s indefatigable enthusiasm as artist in residence/course instructor — as well as a “house party” vibe.
It feels relaxed and impromptu, yet is in fact all carefully curated — as Guinness recently revealed in her cookbook memoir A House Party in Tuscany. Before coming, I had already leafed through the recipes, poring over the “Autumn” section in the hope she might make her persimmon tiramisu (she did).
The duo, along with Guinness’s husband, journalist Matthew Bell, have, over the years, perfected the choreography — she cooks during the day while Roper-Curzon teaches, and everyone dresses up for an aperitivo, and then takes their seat at a casual, yet beautifully laid trestle table. Bell puts on a jazzy pre-dinner soundtrack, pours strong Campari spritzes to get the party going and then works out a placement each evening, so that no one has to sit next to the same person too often.
After dinner — always two ample courses (including a cake or sweet tart) washed down with magnums of Chianti — guests repair to the palazzo’s frescoed living room for a digestivo and a spot of piano (and, I learnt, at times dancing — although not this particular week).
It is a highly sociable experience — and not one for those who want to be delivered breakfast in bed, or have supper in front of Netflix. “It’s basically 18 meals together, and that isn’t for everyone,” Bell said to me one evening. Guinness and Roper-Curzon have found that they can do six courses per year, but anymore “gets a bit much”.
The focus of the week — aside from eating and drinking — is oil painting, something I considered myself not bad at when I was doing A-level art, but have barely revisited in the decades since.
Guests either bring their own kit, or you can advance-order a £260 set of paints and brushes from Zecchi, a fancy fine art supplier in Florence, where Bell and Guinness live for most of the year. Along with Arniano’s new merch — embroidered Irish linen aprons and tote bags — one could look and feel misleadingly professional. Most of us, however, were either rusty or newbies. All of us, I sensed, were there to get away from real life.
Strict rules about not getting paint on the palazzo’s antique furniture or frescoes meant that our group was confined to working en plein air — no hardship in such stunning surroundings, with vistas stretching across the Sabine Hills just waiting to be committed to canvas.
An airy chapel at the end of a pathway lined with olive trees had been fashioned into a de facto studio — with tarpaulins protecting the floor and tables erected for bottles of paint thinner and linseed oil, plus vast rolls of paper towels which, it turned out, are the secret to almost everything.
My excuse for not having got out my (unquestionably now dried-up) oil paints over the years is that it is too much of a faff, and that oil painting must be done slowly, over many days, building up the layers, and that there is never time to finish.
Nonsense, Roper-Curzon corrected me, as we primed six Zecchi canvas boards with different pastel shades — each of us will, in fact, be completing at least two paintings a day and should return home with 10. When he is on a roll, painting uninterrupted in his adopted home city of Athens, he can churn out three saleable ones in a day. I tried to picture my husband’s face as I return with 10 amateur oil paintings for him to hang around the house.
On our first full day, we began with a morning of rapid charcoal sketches around the gardens — alive with bees and dragonflies and still in full blaze in the glorious autumn sun. Roper-Curzon strolled around from one easel to the next, dropping in the odd comment about negative space, the golden section and mark-making. I felt happily transported back in time to the school art room. By lunchtime, however, I was starving — unaccustomed to standing for so long and not snacking at all between breakfast and lunch.
That afternoon, after a lunch of pasta, tart, Parma ham and salad served under a pergola in the garden, we started oil painting in earnest, with roughly two hours to complete a scene of our choice. Time for a podcast, I thought, before swiftly checking myself: no, just be in the moment.
Earlier, Roper-Curzon had given us some key instructions: do not muddle your brush in your thinner — “dip and wipe” on a wodge of paper towel instead and your thinner will last you for days; wrap your palette in foil — that way you can just throw the foil away at the end of your session instead of cleaning; mix paints on your palette with a palette knife — never with a brush, as that way smudginess lies.
With these pointers in mind, I chose a view of three cypress trees leading up to the palazzo’s loggia, crisp against the perfect October sky. The hours went by swiftly — but all I had to show for it was a slavishly representative and unfinished sketch.
“My goal is to loosen up,” I announced over a second Campari spritz before dinner. “Great!” said Roper-Curzon, approvingly. I knew he had heard it all before. How he would manage to keep up this level of vim over the week with all of us I did not know — but somehow he really did. It was impressive and infectious. I think the lunchtime Vermentino helped.
While six days seemed daunting to begin with — it was soon beyond the halfway point, which didn’t leave a very long time to achieve my goal. Roper-Curzon did several demos, during which we stood around in our Arniano aprons watching intently as he stood, poised, blocking in areas of colour on his canvas with his left hand. With a few marks here and there, he had achieved in minutes what for most would be a lifetime of attempted looseness.
Arniano courses usually take place at Guinness’s mother’s six-bedroom farmhouse in Tuscany (as well as at Roper-Curzon’s family home Pylewell in England, and one or two locations in Europe). Palazzo Parisi, however, is the trio’s first stab at another Italian venue, intended to appeal in particular to return guests who, as Roper-Curzon put it, could “get a bit tired of painting the same cypress tree”.
Never mind the same tree — painting is, it turns out, tiring. What’s more, the village church’s bell, which seemed to be positioned directly outside my window, tolled loudly every 15 minutes from 7am and — being a secret introvert and unaccustomed to a house party that lasts any longer than a weekend — I started to feel a bit delirious. (Other guests, whose rooms I suspected to be far removed from the bell, seemed quite rested.)
A lazy afternoon at the pool at the end of the garden beckoned. One guest had already caved in. What, I asked myself, would van Gogh do? I decided to immortalise a view of the pool and chapel instead and set up my easel accordingly.
Looseness came by accident — via fatigue and laziness. Tiring of switching between palette knife and brush every time I mixed a new shade, I began to daub my canvas directly with the palette knife, as if plastering a wall. It was quite effective. Roper-Curzon, on one of his rounds, suggested I could also use the point of my knife to remove flecks of paint to suggest olive leaves. This was a bit of a game-changer, I decided, and began to scrape away. “This is your best yet!” he said, on his final tour of our efforts that day.
By the end of the week, despite almost everyone drinking at lunchtime and having seconds of pudding we were still, remarkably, hard at it, desperate to achieve something frame-worthy. When it was time to pack up, Roper-Curzon explained how we would be transporting multiple still-wet canvases (in many cases long-haul), using bits of cork — from the considerable number of Chianti magnums consumed — wedged carefully between the artworks.
“Please don’t write about the course,” one of my new American friends said to me as we taped up our stacks in bubble wrap. “Or we will never be able to get a place next year!” “I’m going to eat carrots for a week now,” said another. At home, I unpacked my paintings ceremoniously in front of my family. One had dripped on to the other — a landscape I considered to be my best effort — leaving an unsightly smear on the blue sky. A memento rather than a masterpiece, and, I conceded, bound for the downstairs loo rather than the mantelpiece.
Details
Rebecca Rose was a guest of the Arniano Painting School (arnianopaintingschool.com). A six-night course at Palazzo Parisi starts from £2,700 per person based on two people sharing a room, all inclusive except for paints and brushes
Rebecca Rose is the editor of FT Globetrotter
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