Doorway Sicily

Nancy Cicchetti was standing somewhere in front of a grand building — perhaps in Italy, perhaps somewhere further from home than usual — and she looked up. That upward glance, camera in hand, caught everything: the warm blush of old plaster walls, stone angels reclining above the arch as if they had been resting there for centuries, and beyond the glass and through the open door, a sky so blue and full of cloud that it seemed to belong to another world entirely. Back in her San Anselmo studio, that photograph became a starting point and then something else altogether. The terracotta deepened. The shadows under the arch thickened. The reflections in the glass door panels became their own small paintings within the painting — a courtyard, green trees, a balustrade glimpsed in passing. The sky through the arch grew more luminous, more insistent, as if it were pressing forward to be seen. The classical figures above the doorway, carved in relief, seemed to lean into the composition with quiet authority. What Cicchetti gives us here is a painting about thresholds — the moment before you step through, when the world behind you is terracotta and stone and carved marble, and the world ahead is open sky. It is a painting that begins a story and waits, patiently, for the viewer to walk through the door and finish it.