Female portaits

I like painting eyes, I enjoy it… they are shining, liquid, moving,shimmering… they are lively! They can make the whole face alive because we receive endless information, emotions, stimulation through a glance, eyes are the door to the soul or to that impalpable something that belongs to mankind. When I paint a face I always start from the eyes: they are the key that opens all the rest of the painting and when I don’t succeed in making them as I want, I throw all the canvan away! My focus on female subjects is my personal tribute to women even if I have always got on better with men that I find more direct, frank and outright. But women… women are complicated, overwhelmed, controversial, wells as deep as their eyes. In our patriarchal society they carry on battles for freedom, they have been heroines and daughters of heroines that may be only fighting for they right to education or to the vote have never lowered their head and have affirmed their individuality as a being not subjected to men. I have often painted Ophelia, the character taken from Hamlet by Shakespeare and dear to the Pre-Raphaelites .She had to obey to her father’s authority first, then she was subjected to her brother and to the supposed madness of the prince Hamlet she was in love with , so she became the victim of the men she loved most, who led her to neurosis and suicide. This is why she can be considered a symbol for all the modern Ophelia that straggle to assert their intrisic value notwithstanding the cultural burden that wants them to be submitted to men. I model young girls whose glance entices me and I render them through the colours used in the impressionist style, trying to catch the fragility, the sweetheart together with the strength that belongs to women. The painting is materic and the colours are often as contrasting and strong as the feelings and drives inside each woman.

Horses

One of my childhood dreams was the achievement of an exhibition entirely about horses. I imagined my paintings hanging from the walls of a gallery: they were mostly white , rising up on their legs or shaking their heads, they were all moving, imposing, free, an explosion of strength and elegance. I was more or less eight at the age when I was fancying about my array of horses and now I often can't believe I have held on to that dream and have never betrayed that insicure and introverted child. Now many of those horses are all over the word, a part of me and of the dreaming child with them in the homes of people who got entangled with their free spirit. These canvans are mostly achieved with acrylic colours worked with a spatula creating a material texture. I use squirts of colour to emphasize the idea of movement and the animal often overwhelms the watcher as if it was coming out from the canvan. I prefer the white or the black or vivid, unrealistic colours used in the same style of the Expressionists.

Portraits on commission