The Artful Engineer

As beautiful as Rome is, it has plenty of rough edges. We’ll start this set with an old latch on a well-graffitied door, above.

This is a simple scene, below, but the colors of the pallet and the wall pair together well. As with most of this week’s images, there are a lot of textures in play, too. I also like the hint of blue in the shadows on the far left. (It is actually the reflection of a car in a window.)

Here’s another window that I could have included in last week’s post:

I like the composition of this image, with the double drainpipes leaning ever-so-slightly into the image. I enjoy finding little scenes like this. At this size, it may not be obvious what I am alluding to in the title: there is a small padlock on one of the window bars. Since Rome is cracking down on “love locks,” perhaps the couple felt safe putting it here in an out-of-the-way alley. Choosing what looks like a prison cell window doesn’t seem to convey a particularly romantic message, though.

Even really abused walls in Rome look beautiful. This one is a feast of textures with a nice color palette:

This composition has lots of diagonals converging towards the center. Part of what makes this image work is the shadow of an unseen tree on the building in the upper left: it results in the only really bright portion of the image being in the center. That bright area is where you look first, and you explore from there. The contrast between the bright, tidy building with regularly-spaced windows and the graffiti-covered wall shadowed in the foreground adds a lot of interest. There’s an unusual tension, too, because most of the image is in shadow.

Graffiti can be visually striking—and sometimes downright impressive—but I am always a little leery about sharing it because, with very rare exceptions, I have no idea what it means. That’s true for me in the US, and certainly true in a foreign country. I’m sure that if I did know, I probably wouldn’t share it. Fortunately, the odds are low that anyone who can understand it is following my blog.

I’m going to try to wrap up Rome over the next several weeks. I’ve got a pretty big backlog of other places piling up: Stockholm, Helsinki, Canada, as well as some from California and around Colorado.

Thank you so much for visiting!