Ion Șinca1950—2014 The official archive of his work

Ion Șinca · The places

Where he painted

Of the 216 documented works, 83 also say where they were painted — in the title, in a note, or among the motifs. This page puts them on a map.

What shows up at once: his world was small. Not poor — small. Most of it came out of a circle some twenty-five kilometres across, between Brebu, Cornu and Pietriceaua, which you can drive across in half an hour. He went back to the same places for twenty years.

The one distant place he returned to just as stubbornly is the sea. The whole „Țărm” (Shore) series — eight works between 1990 and 2010 — was painted at Vama Veche, from the same cliff, always looking down. The white cliff in the title of the 1990 work is that cliff.

The country

At the scale of Romania. The larger the dot, the more works; the nine places in Prahova sit in a single dot.

PRAHOVA64Viscri7Vama Veche9Rucăreni1↑ POLAND · RADZYŃ CHEŁMIŃSKI · 2
Outline from Natural Earth data

The circle

The same places in Prahova, at their true scale. No country outline: at twenty kilometres, borders say nothing — distances do.

Cornu10Brebu10Pietriceaua10Podu Cheii1Breaza1Aluniș1Valea Doftanei5Măgurele1Ploiești2510 KM
Tap a dot to see the works

Ploiești

Prahova County25 works

1988—2014

Brebu

Prahova County10 works

1994—2012

Cornu

Prahova County10 works

1994—2011

Pietriceaua

Brebu, Prahova County10 works

2002—2009

Vama Veche

Limanu, Constanța County9 works

1990—2010

Viscri

Bunești, Brașov County7 works

2012—2013

Valea Doftanei

Prahova County5 works

1985—2007

Radzyń Chełmiński

Poland2 works

1984—1985

Aluniș

Prahova County1 work

2007

Breaza

Prahova County1 work

2007

Măgurele

Prahova County1 work

1994

Podu Cheii

Brebu, Prahova County1 work

2002

Rucăreni

Soveja, Vrancea County1 work

2002

What is not on this map

133 works out of 216. For these, nowhere does it say where they were painted — not in the title, not in the exhibition catalogue, not in the family's notes. You can see a hill, a willow, a gully; you cannot see which hill. We could have placed them roughly, somewhere in Prahova, and the map would have looked richer. We did not: a map that guesses is no longer a map.

They are all gathered in one place, with a photograph and a year, on a page made so that someone can answer: Where was this painted? ↗ If you recognise a hill, a house or a fence, it takes one line from there.

Rucăreni has been found: a village in Soveja commune, in Vrancea County, some two hundred kilometres from home. It is the only place on this map that comes not from a painting trip but from a memory — the road he took through Vrancea to school as a young man. The painting is from 2002, which means he painted it almost thirty years later, from his head. The dot marks Soveja commune: the village is not listed separately in mapping databases, and the difference is under a kilometre.

Two things we assumed, told here so they can be corrected: Măgurele we placed in Prahova County, because that is where the rest of his world is, but the title does not say which Măgurele. And Strada Fortunei and the studio at Ion Creangă 15 we placed in Ploiești, where he taught for thirty years.

Every locality's coordinates were checked one by one, not written from memory. If you recognise a place in a work that has none, tell us — this part of the archive grows one work at a time. dd@m75.ro

Where was this painted? ↗ · Where the works are today ↗ · The archive of the work ↗