Liz Cochrane is a delightful English woman and has been living in Montisi for many years. She is a great painter and gives painting lessons in and around Montisi. Lessons are mainly in watercolour but feel free to enquire about sketching and about oils.

Liz also has a studio where you can see and purchase her watercolours and her oil paintings.

Liz writes:

“Montisi is my home and I know her colours throughout the seasons like the lines on my hands. From the more obvious panoramas that passing tourists will stop their cars to photograph to the shaded narrow backstreets and the secret views through doorways into private gardens.  The way the sunlight and the shadows describe its ancient walls at different times of the day and year. As the sun moves, different doorways are featured as each month passes. The reflected light from that baking sun bounces off the walls in the summer and gives the street and the people a warm glow.  

I know the most decorated doorways of the most  house proud Montisani or which flowers casually grow in abundance in the lush fields around the village in spring. The flags that decorate each Contrada during the festival or petals on the street for a religious festival.

Walking on sun baked donkey tracks in the countryside that lead through secret shady woodland paths, the countryside changes from green, to  gold as fireflies twinkle at night, then to grey during the summer as the wheat is cut and the clay soil shows through the dusty fields.  I have my favourite olive groves with ancient trees that stretch their twisted limbs towards the sun.  

Monte Amiata is grey, blue or clear with detail sometimes and other times not there at all and disappears behind the rain in a summer storm or an Autumn fog. The red clarity of the sunset in the first chill of Autumn and what the village looks like covered in fresh snow on those now rare occasions or even just the Christmas lights reflected in the wet winter streets at night.

Then as the blossoms struggle through with the first warmth of spring, the fields are sprinkled with flowers again and decorative birds arrive from Africa.  A vibrant green colours the landscape and the whole cycle starts again.”

For further information visit Liz’s website or call +39 338 3875128.