Tom Cross, Street in Italy, Recanati, 1981

Additional Information:

In the mid-1950s, Tom Cross was awarded the Abbey Minor Scholarship, worked at the British School of Rome and travelled in northern Italy. Recanati, a town and commune in the Province of Macerata, to the North East of Rome is, perhaps, a town the artist visited while in Italy. As this work was created much later, while Tom Cross lived and worked in Cornwall, it is possible that he revisited Italy or worked from a photograph he had taken years ago. The 'Street in Italy, Recanati' captured by the artist is executed in energetic strokes of a soft and thick pencil, on a warm ochre background with cutouts of white paper layer on top defining the doors and windows of the houses. An interesting detail is a ragged crack splitting the street in two as it curves to the right in the perspective.