I paint to tell stories…
Social confinements, sexuality, and gender politics concerning mostly women, minorities, and social disparity, have since the beginning been of my interest.
Living in Italy for almost two decades has inevitablely affected my work and choice of subject matter. The art of the Renaissance in particular, so present in Florence has had a very strong impact on me: the theatricality and beautiful portraits, the fabulous use of colors especially in the mural paintings. Furthermore, the presence of the catholic moral values so very rooted in this society together with the demands and expectations of that being a wife and a mother has afflicted my subject matter to a large extent not to mention the the underlying hippocracy and the juxtaposition of the madonna and the whore.
People inspire me the most and my obsession with the rendering of human physiognomy gives me a strong emotional connection to the subject I portray. I need to be physically and mentally in touch with what I create, why my work rarely comes from photos alone.
The people I select for my paintings can be people I know, but mostly I seek them out, putting myself at times in situations where I do meet minorities like visiting elder homes or hanging out in public places where minorities gather. Combining my impressions and drawings with the photos I take I begin to transform the chosen person into something else, but certain ideas are already taking place in the drawing process where I pick up different energies and images. In the end, the person I portray figures as an actor in a personal social, religious, or political comment.
The passion for drawing concerns also the nude body… and even though many times they are thought of as a study or preliminary work for my paintings, as well as my portraits, many of them become valid works in themselves. Africa and African people have always been of interest, I am attracted to the history of their continent, theirs personal stories, their physiognomy, and their black skin. Now, because the black males represent a certain sexual desire to many women and are envied by many Italian / European men for their larger attributes I began to pick out male models for my nude drawings as a comment on this idea. I wanted ( and still do) to give a female view of desire in juxtaposition with the ever-male artistic occupation of rendering nude women in their paintings.
As a Painter, I prefer to work with acrylics, watercolors, and ink, because they are more immediate and fit my character better. I do though turn to oils once in a while if it suits that particular painting better, and also because the acrylic paint has some limitations in depth and articulation.
The surface of my paintings is very important; that is, how things are rendered and the sense of texture. This is the reason why I sometimes use natural materials to enhance texture, which in turn creates a curious and interesting three-dimensional play with the rest of the painting.
I try to be playful and inventive, and I struggle hard to break away from traditional image-making. Working with watercolor collages, imprints, and different mediums on paper helps me to do that.
Artists that I look up to and who inspire me are Marlene Dumas, Francis Bacon, and Egon Schiele, and more contemporary artists are African American artists such as Kerry James Marshall and Njideka Akunyili Crosby just to mention a few.
