There’s a particular kind of heat you only find in an Italian summer — dry, golden, with the sound of water somewhere just out of sight. This painting came from exactly that. A few years ago I spent part of a summer in Tuscany, and one afternoon we found a waterfall tucked into the hills, the kind of cool green pocket you stumble on when the day has become too hot to keep walking. I took photographs, but I knew even then I’d want to paint it one day.
Watercolour felt like the only honest way to do it. It’s a medium that behaves a little like water itself — it flows where it wants, pools, bleeds, and never fully does as it’s told. For most subjects that’s a challenge, but for falling water and dappled summer light it’s a gift. I let the paint move the way the waterfall did, keeping the whites of the paper for the brightest spray and letting the greens and blues settle into the shade beneath the rocks.
Water is one of the hardest things to paint, because it never sits still and has no fixed edges. With watercolour you can’t fight that — you have to work with it. So instead of painting the water itself, I painted the light around it: the wet shine on the stone, the deep cool shadows, the soft haze where spray meets warm air. Let those sit right and the water almost paints itself.
Watercolour and my sea paintings share the same heart — both are really about capturing water and light in a moment that won’t hold still. A Tuscan waterfall or a Cornish wave, it’s the same pursuit. This one is a way of keeping a single hot, green, quiet afternoon in Italy.
If you have a landscape or a special place you’d like captured — a favourite view, a holiday you don’t want to forget — I take watercolour commissions from your photographs. You can start a commission or ask a question over on my https://www.klaudiapolakowska.com/product/painting-from-photo/
