Ciottoli e Piume

It comes about like this, the Ciottoli e Piume wallpaper: from a slow walk along the bank of a canal, on a morning that seems to come out of a picture book. It is in this picture-book gouache — steady brushstrokes, each colour its own decided shape — that I wanted to fix a child in a little red coat, looking straight ahead, and behind him, in a loose line, five or six ducks with their necks stretched and their webbed feet in mid-air, as in a small unhurried procession.

The canal takes up the lower part of the picture with its light ripple; a low stone bridge crosses it further off, and a row of terraced houses closes the horizon above. The composition breathes: the child and his retinue of ducks stay slightly off centre, leaving around them the open space that every well-told tale grants its reader. The palette keeps to a few sure tones — the cream of the paper, slate blue, brick red, ochre and white, moss green, stone grey — each laid as a frank field of colour, with the settled rim of the wash still visible on the water and on the coat.

a gaze that has no age, the one that follows unhurriedly the person it loves: close up, the brushstrokes of feather and hair, the small rings of water behind each foot, the rough grain of the pebbles under the boots tell of the minute care with which, at WallZad, every wall becomes an illustrated page to live in, hung unhurriedly like this Ciottoli e Piume wallpaper in the room of a child growing up.