September 27-October 4
AN ALTERNATIVE
RETREAT FOR ARTISTS
Sguardo Lento
Experience
A curated, immersive program (7 or 10 days)
designed to provide mid-career artists,
educators, and creatives with a base in the
heart of Tuscany.
The Concept:
Changing your location changes your brain.
We hope to provide you with the means of
doing just that.
Perhaps your gaze is tired of always being right. Perhaps your hand already knows too well what to do. Perhaps the work has become efficient, and a part of you feels that efficiency alone is not enough to keep a practice alive. Sguardo Lento is this: an invitation to stop executing your practice and return to its root. To look with patience. To touch matter. To let yourself be surprised by a surface, a light source, a rhythm. We have built a week — or ten days — in the heart of Siena and Tuscany so that this can actually happen.
“You don't come here to produce. You come here to reclaim your sight.”
Deborah Dancy
Visiting Artist 2026
The Shared Studio
A studio, not a classroom Unlike residencies that assign you a room and leave you alone with your work, Sguardo Lento is a true shared studio experience. We work together, in the same spaces, inside common questions, passing through accessible yet expressive materials. There is no program to "finish". There is a week of concentrated attention, guided by two artists with decades of experience bridging practice, teaching, and experimentation. The technical sessions are not lessons in a scholastic sense. They are opportunities. When we work with cyanotype, we use the Tuscan sun as a printing tool. When we draw in San Galgano under a roofless nave, we are not just doing composition exercises: we are letting a thirteenth-century ruin teach us something about contemporary space. When we build illustrated diary pages, collages, and visual sequences on the villa's veranda, the focus is not the final result, but the dialogue between hand, memory, and landscape; assembling a series of mnemonic images. We provide the technical [and logistical] support. Tuscany provides the spark.
The Reboot
Why Siena changes artists There are places that do not just inspire: they recalibrate. Siena is one of these. It is the city where medieval painters tackled problems of light, narrative, and space that remain central to many contemporary artists today. Walking in the National Picture Gallery, pausing in front of Duccio's gold backgrounds, reading Lorenzetti as a very early form of visual construction of civic thought: all this shifts something. It is not nostalgia. It is permission. The permission to slow down, return [to curiosity]curious, and let technique support vision instead of replacing it. This is your cognitive reboot.
Siena & The
Gold Ground
Tradition
A sanctuary free from modern automobile traffic inside historic ramparts, where the early Renaissance still breathes.
Historical Sanctuary
The absolute capital of
medieval painting.
Sienese paintings of the fourteenth century stands out for its
exstraordinary Gothic elegance, fused for a profound spiritual
sense. Masters like Duccio, Simone Martini, and the Lorenzetti
Brothers abandoned Byzantine rigidity introducing sinuous
lines, precious narrative details, and highly luminous gold
details. This school revolutionized the Italian scene, creating
masterpieces of immense beauty and chromatic innovation.
Curated Excursions
Field research, curated for artists.
Each excursion is designed as a visual resource meant to nourish the work well beyond the time of the retreat.
Pinacoteca Nazionale
Duccio, Simone Martini, Lorenzetti, Beccafumi: a pilgrimage into color and form. The gold background as a theory of light.
The Narrative Frescoes
Abbey of Monte Oliveto Maggiore.
Red brick abbey with frescoes by Il
Sodoma, featuring a functioning
historical apothecary.
And from 2027 the ‘premium week end’ extension: Etruscan Coast and Maremma.
SATURNIA
HOT SPRINGS
SINCE PREROMAN TIMES
"Tuscany is not just a place for the eye, but a rhythm for the hand. To paint here is to collaborate with centuries of light."
SGUARDO LENTO
The Artist's Provision
Immersing yourself in the atmosphere of Siena makes experimenting with
traditional, artisanal processes feel entirely natural. The environment itself inspires a return to the roots of creation, such as crafting your own egg tempera from scratch. Whether you require specific natural pigments for your mixtures, authentic handmade papers, or fine linen canvases, local purveyors cater to this historical fine arts tradition, offering high-end, raw materials at prices that respect the working artist.
The Setup — We provide
the technical support;
Tuscany provides the
inspiration.
We emphasize travel-friendly, expressive mediums that allow the artist to move through the landscape without the burden of heavy equipment.
Our curriculum focuses on the intimate connection between the eye, the hand, and the paper.
Historical Formulas
Mastering the chemistry of the masters.
We explore traditional gesso
preparation, gold leaf, distemper, cyanotype, and
the luminosity of early watercolor
techniques.
Immediate
Tecniques
The art of the moment. We focus on
life drawing, linoleum cut, watercolor and guache 'en plain air'
—processes that reward intuition and provide immediate, visceral results.
Narrative & Innovation
The artist's voice in the digital age.
From daily journal-making, and auto-fiction graphic novels, to critical
evening discussions on the intersection
of Generative AI and human craft.
METHODOLOGY
The Studio & The Practice
Cyanotype — simple chemistry, Tuscan light, botanical
contactor photograpy prints.
Outdoor watercolor and gouache — to capture atmosphere, light, and structure
Life drawing and frottage — to train the eye and collect traces.
Historic Tecniques for a contemporary practice— Traditional Gesso, Distemper, Gold Leaf basics.
Illustrated diary — notes, images, collage, visual writing
Visual storytelling and comics — reading the self as sequence and story
Light mixed media on paper — layering, retouching, montage, memory
Generative AI — as an experiment, interlocutor, and discussion topic
Not everything enters into every session.
The week breathes: some mornings are slow and analytical, some afternoons faster and more instinctive.
The Evenings
The evenings: when experience becomes thought Days are for doing. Evenings are for thinking, listening, and sharing. The first two evenings are informal and unhurried: communal dinner, wine, first conversations. Who are you? What brought you here? What do you feel you want to interrupt or transform in your practice? From Wednesday comes the Artists' Circle: each participant takes the floor for twenty or thirty minutes, not to teach, but to share. An artwork. A turning point. A doubt. We facilitate. The group responds. It is not academic critique: it is mutual testimony.
To this, two thematic evenings are added:
-
"Art, publishing and the market today"
-
"AI in art and marketing: tool, risk or interlocutor?"
We bring data, experiences, positions, doubts. Not prefabricated solutions.
These evenings are not an extra. They are the intellectual backbone of the week. Studio work fuels the conversation; the conversation restores depth to the studio work.
A visual diary of our evenings.The residency's practice has its roots in these moments of encounter: a process of exchange that finds its full realization here, transforming individual thought into a collective experience.
WHO THIS IS FOR
You have been making work for years. This is for what comes next.
You are not a beginner looking for foundations. You are not a tourist looking for beautiful light and a glass of wine — though there will be both. You are an artist who has already built a practice, found a language, and learned what it takes to stay in the work over time. And somewhere along the way, the work started to feel a little too known. The hand is capable. The eye is trained. The results are consistent. That is precisely the problem. Sguardo Lento is designed for artists at this juncture: experienced enough to recognize stagnation, honest enough to want to do something about it. You may work in painting, drawing, printmaking, illustration, or mixed media. You may teach, or write, or make books. What brings you here is not a lack of skill, but a need to recalibrate — to slow the gaze down until it starts to surprise you again. We have capacity for a maximum of ten participants per session. We choose them carefully, because the group is part of the experience.
SGUARDO LENTO
Visting Artist 2026
Deborah Dancy
Sguardo Lento Artists Residency is proud to announce that the American painter, printmaker and mixed media artist, Deborah Dancy will be the Visiting Artist in Residence for the Fall 2026 session. Deborah is an Emeritus Professor of painting from the University of Connecticut, whose academic career spanned thirty-five years there. Her professional involvement has brought international recognition with her large scale abstractions, her mixed medium installations and photography. Deborah is a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow and her work is in the collections of such prestigious institutions as the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Birmingham Museum of Art, the Baltimore Museum of Art and many others.
You may view her work here:
The Curators of
Stilness
About: Your Hosts (Who)
Seeking a change?
Maybe you're interested in:
01 Orienting a different perspective.
02 Strategizing a change in process.
03 Expanding one's range of medium.
04 Accessing new content.
05 Referencing historic narratives.
Timothy McDowell
Painter, Printmaker, Professor Emeritus
Traditional Mediums
With an MFA from the University of Arizona and over 40 years as
a professor at Connecticut College, Timothy splits his time
between the Connecticut shoreline and his residence in Siena. His
work, represented by Marcia Wood Gallery (Atlanta), combines
printed aluminum plates with oil painting and is held in
collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art (NY).
He brings a deep knowledge of traditional mediums—encaustic,
distemper, intaglio—and a passion for teaching in the field.
Daniele Marotta
Comic Artist, Illustrator, Educator
Graphic Narratives
Founder of the Scuola di Fumetto e Scrittura di Siena and Inkdrop
Studio, Daniele operates at the intersection of graphic narrative
and new technology. An experienced comic artist (Superzelda,
Inferno 1861, Maria e il Buio), he has illustrated for major Italian
publishers and taught as a Weissmann Visitor Artist at
Connecticut College.
For twenty years, he has been researching sustainable publishing
models that place the author at the center, spanning from
artisanal craftsmanship to international crowdfunding. Daniele
experiments with all painting techniques and pushes the
boundaries of the medium, creating one of the world’s first
graphic novels using Artificial Intelligence (The Shadow: from
Andersen). He is your guide to the contemporary art scene, eager to share the
heart of Tuscan history, lifestyle, atmosphere, and flavors.
"Our mission is to foster a space where the artist's eye can rest,
observe, and eventually, see something entirely new in the
familiar light of the Tuscan hills."