I grew up in Rome. The city is in everything I paint and design, even when I do not mean for it to be.
Rome, my muse is the first post in La Bottega. The bottega is the artist’s workshop in the Italian tradition. The place where Renaissance painters trained, mixed pigments, took commissions, and made the work that fed everything else. This category is where I write about the broader practice. The places that shape my eye, the experiments that push my range, the work that lives outside any one collection.
I am starting with Rome because Rome is where it all starts.
What Rome gives me
Rome is a burnt sienna city. A terracotta city. The warm rust of old roof tiles, the deep orange of late afternoon walls, the way travertine and brick and aged plaster all land in the same family of warm earth tones.
It is also an ochre city, an olive city, a city of warm neutrals that have aged into themselves over centuries. Nothing in Rome is bright. Everything is layered, weathered, slightly faded, deeply alive.
I did not choose this palette. The palette chose me. I grew up surrounded by these colors and they live in my hand now. When I paint, even when I am painting California or Provence or somewhere tropical, the warm undertones come back. Rome put them there.
Watercolor swatches in terracotta, sienna, ochre, olive. This image is incredibly strong for the post because it literally shows the Rome palette as watercolor on paper, before any of it becomes a pattern. Pure source material.]
The other thing Rome gives me is a way of seeing gardens. Not the manicured English kind. Roman gardens are slightly wild, slightly overgrown, painterly. Flowers grow through cracks. Olive trees lean. Vines climb walls that have been there for a thousand years. Everything in a Roman garden looks like it was painted rather than planted.
From sanpietrini to surface
Painter’s Garden is the most direct expression of Rome in my work so far. It started as a study in painterly florals, loose watercolor blooms with delicate botanicals and organic textures. Not arranged, not tidy. Painterly in the literal sense, paint doing what watercolor does on its own.
But the collection is more than the florals. It is a coordinating set, built the way a Roman room is actually layered. One painted wall, one tile floor, one textured throw, one quiet solid.
The tessellated tile patterns in the collection come from the streets themselves. Sanpietrini, the small dark cobblestones that pave central Rome, laid in fan patterns that ripple under your feet. Roman mosaics, the kind you find on the floors of old churches and ruins, tesserae set by hand a thousand years ago and still holding together. Both made their way into the supporting prints. The herringbone texture, the small geometric repeats, the warm brown and olive blender patterns, all of them carry the rhythm of Roman pavement.
The hero floral works as a statement on its own. The tessellated tile prints work as supporting players. Together they make a complete interior the way a Roman room would actually look. Layered, never matched.
Where this work belongs
The collection is built for wallpaper, home textiles, table linens, and interior applications. It wants old plaster walls and natural light. A powder room with brass fixtures. A breakfast room that opens onto a garden. A bedroom with linen sheets and worn wood floors. Anywhere you would put a painting, this work wants to be.
What’s next in La Bottega
This is the first post in this category. There will be more. I am working on writing about my Provence collection, other destinations and cultures that inspired me and color studies from the notebook, the way decisions actually get made in the studio, and the places I have traveled that keep showing up in the work. La Bottega is where the broader practice gets to live.
Explore the Painter’s Garden Collection get in touch about licensing..
