My Favourite Painting - Arlene Blankers

Studies of the Virgin and Child with the Infant Baptist by Giorgio Gandini del Grano

- Giorgio Gandini del Grano

Drawing, both as act and art, is, with good reason, referred to as the foundation of art and the most intimate form of artistic creation and expression. I am drawn to Old Master drawings that were, in effect, sketches and often unfinished and unsigned, which has always been of great fascination to me, despite the vast array of art and genres that I experience in my day-to-day life. I find the movement created in the figures and facial expressions from each stroke of the chalk or ink the start of a unique story in time. A sketch can reveal so much of the artist and the history of the country in which it was produced at a glance. This Gandini del Grano work is one of the most notable that I recently discovered in the Robert Landolt Collection. Although it is only the size of a hand, the detail is exquisite and demonstrates the outline of what will have ultimately been a sketch for a much larger work.