A Person In A Dress Riding A Horse In A Field
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The Power of Primavera

A PHOTO ESSAY BY BILL PHELPS

Inspiration 5 minute read

AN ARTIST’S JOURNEY INTO THE SPIRIT OF TUSCANY
INSPIRED BY BOTTICELLI’S RENAISSANCE MASTERPIECE

A Man With A Beard
Photographer and Film Maker

Bill Phelps

Born in St. Paul, Minnesota, Phelps has built an impressive career despite having no formal art training, lending his talents to Italian Vogue, French Marie Claire, Conde Nast Traveller UK, The New York Times Magazine, Fortune and Interview, and picking up both an IPA Lucie Award and the Grand Prize of Portraits for the World Press.  Phelps is also the co-designer, builder and owner of Cafe Moto in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

A Person In A Dress In A Forest
An allegory of spring
A Person With A Horse
A fantastical world where men are turned into flowers

evocative shifts and suspended realities inspire my photographic work, but within a Classical discipline, of light and shadow, of balanced composition.

It's a place that still feels true to Renaissance values, from the bloom of frescoes across many of its ceilings, to the unspoilt woodland across the estate
A Person With Long Hair
Primavera is painted in oils; a tangle of flowers and diaphonous dresses, picked out in greens, oranges and alabaster
A Person Sitting On A Staircase
It's what Botticelli was hinting at in his Primavera: a place where time passes softly
With communion between the earthly and the sublime

I like abstraction, a loosening of meaning to create feeling. Perhaps that’s what excites me about the Italian Renaissance through the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; that it was a time of dramatic change.

A Fire On A Building
Days are spent truffle hunting, walking through olive groves, wine tasting - immerseing yourself in a landscape that feels unchanged
The stillness found between the old walls of COMO Castello Del Nero is inflected with the flicker of a sleeve, or the ripple of a cypress outside - it's a dreamscape, ripe for imagining

If you'd like to wander the grounds of COMO Castello Del Nero and sink into the essence of Primavera, contact us today.

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