The quality of light and life in Ticino`s temperate climate has attracted artists for decades. Among those living and working in the Locarno-Ascona area of Switzerland are:
– Rolf Gerard, artist.
A man of distinguished presence, Gerard was born in Germany, educated in London and worked the greatest part of his career in the United States. A theater set designer, Gerard worked for more than 20 years with the Metropolitan Opera in New York and collaborated on several ballets, including a 1965 production of ”The Nutcracker Suite” with the late Chicago choreographer Ruth Page.
He settled in Ascona soon after his wife died in 1976.
”I love the place and have been coming here since I was a boy,” he says. ”My mother was an Italian and an opera singer, and after she retired to Lugano, I came very often to Ascona.”
Since his retirement, Gerard has spent mornings sketching and painting, and he was honored with a one-man exhibition of his watercolors and sketches of Venice at the AAA-Association of Artists of Ascona-earlier this year.
Like Venice, Gerard says, ”You`ve got to see Ascona in the winter when the crowds are gone and you can take in the panorama and the whole thing belongs to you.
”It is cut off from the Western world here,” he says of the village.
”It has nothing to do with Paris, London, New York, nothing. There is here an axis between Berlin and Rome or Stockholm and Rome, north and south, but there is nothing here that goes to the west. It`s very east: It has Italian weather and German literature.”
– Yvonne Bolt, art and antiques restorer.
Three stories above Ascona`s sunny piazza overlooking Lago di Maggiore`s deep blue water, Bolt bends over plates of shards, reassembling pieces from the past.
”It is very, very beautiful work; I like it very much,” says the animated, stylish woman who has restored pre-Columbian burial urns, Etruscan jars and the famous baroque plasterwork outside Casa Serodine, Ascona`s best- known secular building and current tourist office.
Strictly speaking, Bolt, 52, is still an assistant after 27 years as the only employee of restoration master Gianni Loreto. The discreet Loreto studio in which she works is in several small rooms at the top of a narrow staircase in one of Ascona`s centuries-old buildings.
Apprenticed by Loreto when she was 25, Bolt exudes enthusiasm about the time-consuming, painstaking work.
Though out of sight of Ticino`s many visitors, those doing art restoration for private collectors and public institutions, including museums and churches, are not uncommon. Bolt knows of at least three competing studios in the region.
Clients find the studios by reputation and come long distances to find a craftsman to repair ancient art. (Among the finished projects in the studio is a piece from a private collection in Joliet.)
Arranging the pieces of a broken pot can take months. Once the puzzle of the individual parts is unscrambled, the delicate work of reassembly begins. Shards are glued carefully with a time-proven recipe of natural ingredients; a filler for the empty spaces is used only as a last resort.
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”The effort is not to change the design,” Bolt explains.
”It takes many years to learn,” she says of restoration. ”We have to have much time to work. It can`t be rushed.”
– Roland Meutter, bookbinder.
Roland Meutter practices the ancient art of restoring and hand-binding books at Passaggio San Pietro 7, a tiny, tidy shop tucked amidst chic clothing shops and trendy boutiques in the oldest part of Ascona.
He often works on a counter behind the wide glass display window. There he reassembles yellowed chunks of antique tomes and creates handcrafted covers with original designs commissioned by his customers.
”The cover should reflect the inside content,” the sober, bearded artisan says through a translator.
Muetter moved from his native northern Switzerland to Ascona to assume this business from his father-in-law. He works in the small, neat space with his wife, also a trained bookbinder.
Although most of the book covers displayed in the window have contemporary designs, the techniques Muetter uses date to the ancients, as a wall of hand tools attests. Egg whites are used as an adhesive for gold trim. The glue bubbling in a hot pot is made from natural ingredients, not the the synthetics of modern chemistry.
”The glue decomposes itself, like in nature, and does no harm to the paper,” he explains.
His artistry and knowledge are not inexpensive. A gold-embossed leather guest book costs nearly $190. A limited-edition collection of poems and drawings with a custom-designed leather cover is more than $500.