The Puffin at Palazzo Tron by Michelle Lovric

If this post had a subtitle, it would be ‘in which the Royal Mail almost sabotages my debut at the Venice Biennale of Art and I’m made to understand that my artwork is “of no intrinsic value”.’

But in the end that’s just a commonplace tale of lost time, expense and heartbreak caused by an apparently uncaring, untrusted institution that also appears averse to the concept of answering the telephone. You can guess what happened and it reflects well only on the valiant Jack, manager of my local London branch and my lovely postie Neal, who honestly tried to swim against the tide and help.

So enough black bile. I’m not going to go all Ms Lovric versus the Post Office on you here.

This is actually a really lovely story.

And a simple one. 

My forthcoming novel, The Puffin, is as usual set in Venice.

And as has also become usual with my books, early on in the novel’s life, it began to exist in a series of poems that explored its ideas and totems: empire, coercion, hats, feathers, Habsburg Yellow, infidelity, poetry, language, animal consciousness, faith and even catastrophic plumbing, which is of course intrinsic to human unhappiness and therefore a special ornament to storytelling.

The Puffin also began to exist in the form of a hand-painted watercolour leporello. 

               

TThe leporello came courtesy of the gracious Venetian artist Matilde Dolcetti, who invites people to come to her beautiful home at the Palazzo Dandolo at San Tomà where we may work at her dining table on whatever we wish, using watercolours and the deliciously textured paper that she provides. I always make a leporello for the literary work-in-progress. It's a really precious use of time, and an exercise that invariably triggers thoughts, images, ideas and words. It even helps me with pace, as something tangible has to happen in each painted panel. It is time with the novel but not at the keyboard. It’s a full and happy refreshment.

The Puffin leporello performed its usual inspirational duties and I didn’t think any more of it – until I saw that the artist Emilia Kabakov was creating a collateral event at the Venice Biennale of Art this year. It was to be called Diario veneziano, a large-scale “total installation” curated by Cesare Biasini Selvaggi and Giulia Abate. The ambition was to transform the noble floor of Palazzo Tron into a collective narrative space: “not an exhibition about Venice, but an exhibition with Venice”. The artist and curators invited participants to contribute physical objects relating to their lives in the city, along with an explanation about why the object carried important memories, resonance and meaning.

I decided to submit the leporello, not so much as the story-model of a Venetian-based novel but as a tribute to Matilde’s grace and generosity in creating the ephemeral community of her dining table in the heart of Venice.

Diario veneziano was not a competition but I was still highly honoured and delighted to have The Puffin's leporello accepted. I’d never dreamt of being more than a regular and excited Biennale attendee (though I avoid the opening week parties). And I loved the idea of this exhibition. The Biennale is the province of international pavilions, big-name artists, publicity stunts and – more than ever this year – the art business. The crowds it draws are just one more thing Venice has to suffer. So I really appreciated the concept of giving the Venetians their own, private Biennale by them, about them and for them.

And it was even nicer to discover that my dear friend, the artist Déirdre Kelly, also has one of her works in Diario veneziano. We have collaborated as fellow Companions in the Guild of St George, the charity devoted to the works and ideas of John Ruskin. But this was the first time we have been in the same exhibition - Déirdre being a proper artist and me being just a writer who loves painting watercolours. And it was of course Déirdre who had taken me along to Matilde’s watercolour sessions in the first place.  

The Puffin, by the way, is a sequel to what's undoubtedly my best-known novel The Book of Human Skin. The Puffin works as a standalone, introducing new characters and new ideas – but readers who enjoyed Human Skin’s garrulous villain will perhaps feel pleasantly uncomfortable to welcome him back as one of a chorus of narrators. This time, not all of them are human.

The book is published on October 8th. Salt Publishing have designed my favourite-ever cover in a process that was joyfully collaborative. I’ll be doing some events to launch The Puffin, including the Venice Noir festival in November and being interviewed by our poetical Dean, Mark Oakley, at Southwark Cathedral on October 20th (Save the date!)

And of course I have other publicity duties ... 

Although I had for a long time despaired of social media, I worked out that Instagram was probably the most palatable for me. A Puffin in Venice Insta page was born. I acquired a life-size replica of a puffin and began to take him on my journeys around Venice. 

I was happy because it meant that I could work with David Winston, whose photographs of Venice tell incredible stories of their own. David has kindly done various puffin shoots with me, like this one at Benevento in the Strada Nuova, where we illustrated scenes from the book using their fabulous array of damasks, feathers, shoes and a very frightening mannequin.

I treated Instagram as I would a novel – not something personal, but part of my work as a writer. I found a voice for the puffin which means he writes himself. He gives historical insights, he comments wryly, he jokes, he points out the ridiculous. He meets local wildlife. He supports local causes like NoGrandiNavi, which opposes the cruise ships that pollute Venice. He is not exactly the same as the puffin of the novel because he has different work to do.  

And, after being very scared of AI, I found a use for it. Writing captions made use of my literary brain but hashtags rotted it. I use AI to generate the hashtags. So also, they are not my fault.

Despite my poor camera skills and cheap old phone, I went out on the streets to seek original material and I have to say that the puffin has brought me some completely unexpected pleasures. 

The first is seeing things from a different angle – in miniature and in detail. Puffin pictures work best that way. I have loved the chance to refocus.

The second is the joy, for a solitary writer, of interacting with living human beings. Whether I’m taking the puffin to be blessed by the local priest along with cats and dogs at Santa Marina, going shopping with him at antique fairs or smuggling him into exhibitions, people are always intrigued by him. Some do double-takes, thinking the resin model is real. Several people have said gloomily, ‘Now we have PUFFINS in Venice too? It must be Global Warming.’ Other ask if they can touch. Everyone wants to know what I am up to.

I was spending a lot of time explaining the puffin and, as you might have noticed, I don’t have a lot of time. So I went to Veneziastampa in Santa Maria Materdomini – where the wonderful Michele is still using antique machinery. I had some puffin cards printed, and that turned out to be another lovely experience. The cards are very popular. I have to keep reprinting them.

In the last two years, I have also worked with a delightful milliner, Tina Giuntini (aka Bea Evie) who makes bespoke hats, as does Alva, the fiery heroine in my book. Tina lent me the antique millinery tools she collects, so I could feel them in my hands as I wrote the scenes in which they figure. Tina has checked the book for millinery faux pas. To illustrate a part of the plot, she even made me a Bergère bonnet with ribbon compartments for musket balls and rolled-up maps.

Tina also created a tiny Napoleon hat for the puffin and is working a turban with a miniature Barbary plume. All for Instagram, but also for joy.

Speaking of joy, now the leporello stands in a vitrine at the Palazzo Tron's Biennale event, surrounded by toys, handmade lace, wedding veils, antique fishing baskets, letters, schoolbooks and so many other things contributed by Venetians. My explanation of Matilde’s magical afternoons stands beside stories of school days, sporting events, family triumphs and tragedies. Naturally the puffin and I went along to see. It is hard to convey how happy this makes me. 

You were perhaps wondering about the melodramatic subtitle to this post … so I will explain. Yes, the Royal Mail lost the original leporello and my frantic attempts to track it down failed. With the deadline for delivering artwork by then three days way, I hastily repainted the leporello from photographs of the original and sent it to the curators by a reliable courier just in time to be included.

In the course of trying to fill out online forms, I discovered that Royal Mail apparently characterises my leporello as ‘of no intrinsic value’. You see, I was lending it, not selling it to the exhibition. The online forms do not consent to be completed so I sent an actual letter to the Royal Mail.

The leporello, I told them, ‘never was and never will be for sale. But it is a piece of original art that was judged interesting enough for the Venice Biennale of Art, so the Royal Mail’s estimation of “no intrinsic value” says more about the Royal Mail than it does about the artwork.’

Interestingly, the Royal Mail actually replied on May 12. ‘I’m happy to advise,’ wrote my correspondent, apparently without irony, ‘ … that your item was delivered on 11/05/2026.’ There was no mention of the fact that this date was nearly seven weeks after it was posted (via a 3 – 5 day tracked service), a Biblical 40 days after the deadline for exhibition submissions and two days after the Biennale actually opened. There was no explanation of the delay.

Who knows if the original leporello was ever really delivered? I have heard nothing from the curators. The Royal Mail has not to date answered my request for proof of delivery. 

Meanwhile, on a happier note, I have just discovered that my Insta puffin has fellow-travellers on the Isle of Man. The Manx Wildlife Trust (MWT) has used the same resin models to attract puffins back to the Calf of Man, a small island without human inhabitants. The marine conservation officer Lara Howe has explained that puffins are sociable and prefer to breed in colonies, so showing other puffins already in place convinces the living birds that the Calf is a good place to settle.

Perhaps I can attract a permanent colony of puffins to Venice this way? We already have beautiful egrets, cormorants, herons and even owls (none of which the tourists, lost in their phones, ever never seem to notice). 

The puffin is sometimes known as the northernmost Bird of Paradise. 

I think they would feel quite at home in what John Ruskin described as 'the Paradise of Cities'.

Michelle Lovric’s website

'Diario veneziano'
9 May — 28 June 2026
Ca' Tron, Sestiere Santa Croce 1957, Venice (two minutes from the San Stae vaporetto stop).

Venice in the night – Michelle Lovric

All my best moments in Venice have been in the dark, on the water.

I can never get enough of those journeys down back canals in small boats by night, when the city offers her most intimate, most secret and magical hours.

My nights afloat on Venice’s liquid streets always find their way into my novels. They graft themselves to plot-lines, be they scenes of adventure in a children’s book or consummations of passion in novels for adults: sometimes, it seems to me as if Venice has two nights – one for terror and one for love.

Apart from the personal pleasure these journeys give me, I know that they are catnip for my writing. That’s because everything is intensified at night in Venice. For a start, there are fewer packs of tourists to clutter up and dilute the lines of the architecture.

By night, fewer rattling suitcases drown out the tentative and delicate sounds of the water. The tiny real noises of Venice start to make themselves heard … cicadas obsessing in hidden gardens, a rat tugging a lettuce leaf across paving stones, a lone violinist dragging his bow across his instrument at an unseen window. The palaces seem to bend down solicitously, offering their ornaments to view. Architectural patterns, softly illuminated, are suddenly picked out in lyrical clarity.

It’s also at night that Venice’s beauty can most easily become a metaphor for all kinds of things, including interior ugliness, corruption and a looming kind of fear.

In my forthcoming children’s novel, The Wishing Bones, four young people make a journey that combines the two: an after-midnight boat trip through a silent city, drained of colour, during which a young Casanova plays a violin strung with mermaid hair, while gazing into the eyes of the saddest girl I’ve ever written, Sorrowful Lily.

I’ve recently had the pleasure of meeting David Winston, a photographer who makes the night in Venice emotionally legible in almost the same way that I, as a writer, attempt to do. I have walked around Venice with David in brilliant sun and impenetrable mist, shadowing his photography with my notebook, and I’ve loved seeing how he thinks. It soon became clear to me that what I render in words, he renders on paper with chemicals and an artist’s eye. This post is illustrated with pictures from his Nocturnes series.

I showed David’s Nocturnes to a Venetian friend who teaches photography. More than that, this is the same friend who has lately given me the pleasure of night trips around the small canals late at night. He agreed that David’s pictures truly capture that otherworldly experience of the city. ‘Emerge una sensibilità sapiente,’ he said. ‘What comes through is a knowing sensitivity’.

David has kindly allowed me to ask him some questions about how he came to create his Nocturnes.

First of all, you have a completely separate career as a restorer of antique pianos. So how is that you came to spend so much time in Venice?

Just over two years ago I had been through some very big changes in my life. I had been to Venice for Carnevale the previous year, but then I was not alone, so didn’t take the time to get to the heart of the place. When I did go back, through a bit of serendipity, I stayed in the Hotel Ca’ Pisani, near Zattere. I noticed that they had an exhibition in the upstairs foyer. I got into conversation with the owner, Marianna, and asked if she would be interested in exhibiting some of my photographs. She said she’d take a look at my site. After a very short time she came back with a very positive ‘Si’. In preparation for the exhibition, I kept returning to Venice and each time it drew me in a bit more. Eventually it just made sense to rent someplace. Now I spend just under half my time here.

So this change in your circumstances left you free to ask the question, ‘What do I actually want to do now?’ instead of the usual ‘What do I have to next?’ The answer turned out to be, it seems, ‘creating painterly photographs of Venice’?

Yes, I try to come up with an answer to what draws those of us to Venice who want to make it a home. I think, hopefully without sounding too ‘pseudo’, that it is the pursuit of beauty. For me, beauty is somehow evidence of the divine and that is a very human pursuit.

What is it about the night in Venice that draws you?

Venice is a city of mystery – and mystery may choose to hide behind a veil, whether it is a veil of darkness or a veil of mist. When that veil becomes permeable – that’s when the essential character of the place reveals itself. Walking the canals at night you can literally hear the city breathing as the water flows through the veins of the city. You start to understand things …

Venice is a wily mistress. During the day, when the city is overrun by the selfie-taking admirers who trample through her beauty without really asking, she pulls into herself. So it is hard to keep her in your sights unless you can keep the memory of her nights in your head.

I notice that you observe the courtesy of personifying Venice as a woman …

Yes. And if you want to take a picture of a beautiful woman, you do her the courtesy of engaging her in conversation. You have the humility to learn something about her. And you don’t insult her by taking her photo where she is only the backdrop. This mistress knows her beauty. As the sun goes down, she breathes a sigh of relief and you literally feel the city reveal and become herself again as the night draws in. You wrote in one of your books how in the fog ‘Venice deconstructs herself’. That really made me sit up, because it so captured my own feeling about the place. What happens is that, through this deconstruction, you see again the essential elements.

I think that was The Floating Book, which opens in fog and disarray. Venice is notably more ‘of the night’ than most modern cities, isn’t she? Her lighting is dimmer and her darkness is therefore blacker? And her mysteries more profound – and intriguing?

A wonderful thing about Venice is how the lighting is not an all-purpose flooding of the shadows. Instead, everywhere you see a single light over a door, not there to generously light the way of passers-by, but simply to light the doorway for the inhabitants. Late at night, I wander the calle in search of shadowy doorways and colonnades that are full of mystery, revealing little of what is behind them—not only who lives there now, but who lived there before.

Where does that colonnade lead? Do the colonnades invite us to explore further, or do they instil fear of what lurks there? I suppose that, in a way, with my nocturnes what I’m trying to do is also deconstruct and to reveal simply a mood that then must engage our imagination. As a musician, I have always been drawn to the musical form of the nocturne, which is after all much the same idea – music that’s just a suggestion, infused with only sufficient light to reveal its form. Then our imagination has to fill in the rest.

What kinds of stories are you trying to tell?

I want to show my very personal admiration for the dark beauty of this improbable city. I go hunting at night for my images. It is a very emotional process. For me it is a city of full of ghosts and with my Nocturnes I am trying to show where they emerge from the darkness.   

How do you ‘paint the light’ into the raw photographs? Your use of light seems positively editorial.

I actually try to start with a raw image where the light seems to be changing – on the way from light to darkness. So, rather than a static, frozen moment in time, it is capturing the sense of change.

Your photographs rarely remain untouched after they’ve been taken. Because capturing the image is only half of the story, isn’t it? Back in the darkroom, you transform your photographs using the techniques of Gum Bichromate, Cyanotype, Platinum/Palladium, Chlorophyll Print. Why do you use such old-fashioned techniques to re-render them?

Modern photo processes are too exact and do not leave enough to the imagination. Photographs are more often than not simply just used to say ‘I wuz 'ere’… rather than as an expression of emotion. Current processes are more adapted to this simple need. The unpredictability, the happy accidents of the early processes produce a more human, personal result.

I use many different processes in producing my final images. The camera can be an indifferent, objective observer and our brain plays tricks. How often have you taken a photo, only to see later that it was ruined by something in the corner of the picture that you did not notice when you took it? That is because the camera does not have the human filter, which is really the essence of artistic expression. Photography has become more and more sophisticated and at the same time, to me, a disturbingly undervalued form. It can be too easy and the magic is lost. I was looking for a way to produce a photograph which shows what I see - where the machine of the camera is less dominant. I can intervene in the process and produce an image that shows more accurately what I see in my head when I press the shutter.

Most of the processes I use go back to the earliest days of photography in the mid-19th century, although some are also modern techniques I’ve developed along the way. So it can be very bewildering to people when I try to explain what is involved. Essentially, one must start with a blank sheet of watercolour paper and apply various photosensitive chemicals to the paper with a brush. Everything matters and changes the result: how you brush on the chemicals, what kind of brush you use, what type of paper, humidity and of course which chemicals.

I get so excited about all the different possibilities…. in a modern take on the Renaissance use of gold leaf in painting, I have also experimented a lot with printing on thin tissue and then adding gold and silver leaf to the back of an image.

I am happy to use digital techniques where they add to the palette, but again, never in a conventional way. I find that so much digitally-produced photographic work can appear overworked and be totally soulless, so I must leave something to chance in the way I use it. Recently I have been working a lot with multiple exposures created in camera, layering one image over the other. One can get some startling surprises and juxtapositions. I’ve been producing a whole series called ‘Venice Multiplied’. Interestingly, by layering one essential aspect of the Venetian landscape over another, this technique effectively ‘deconstructs’ the city and emphasises a single element in an often fantastical dream world, which is of course what the place is.

Of all the different processes, which are best adapted for telling Venetian stories?

I would say probably the Gum Bichromate process. There are so many ways to build up layers using different pigments and density. It really is a cross between photography and painting. I want my photographs to be stories and stories are, after all, made up of layers.

In this process, watercolour pigments are mixed with light sensitive chemicals and the image is built up in many stages: you must have a different negative for each colour value: red, blue and yellow. The density of the image slowly comes together after as much as 25 different exposures, one over the other. There is a tremendous opportunity to change the final image depending on which pigments you use, obviously.

Then, there is the opportunity to combine different processes, which multiplies the available palette ten-fold. I especially like starting with an image printed in the Prussian Blue of the cyanotype process, then overlaying with several passes of Indigo or Lampblack, which adds wonderful depth to the shadows and renders a beautiful translucent lapis lazuli colour.

Can you give examples of picture with each process?

Of course!

Chlorophyll print

Multiple Exposure

Platinum/Palladium

Cyanotype

Gum Bichromate over Cyanotype

Print on tissue backed with gold and silver leaf

Usually you go out alone foraging for stories, as I do. Are you ever frightened in Venice at night? (I admit that I am)

Every once in a while, I think I should be, but I never really ever am …

Are you exhibiting in the UK any time soon? Where?

Yes, I am. From 4-7 April I will be exhibiting my work at Roy’s People Art Fair, at Bargehouse in London, which is near the OXO Tower. It is a really interesting artist-led show with a wide mix of artists.

Thank you, David, for your time and your patience.  

David Winston’s website
Michelle Lovric’s website
The Wishing Bones is published on July 25th, 2019
Michelle is teaching a pair of Masterclasses called FLOW in London in March and April with Lucy Coats. For more details see here