I am an Italian, Tuscany based artist, mainly self-taught as regards fine art and illustration.
Currently a headteacher, my education covers foreign languages, teaching and illustration.
During the first years of my experience as a teacher, I enrolled in San Francisco Academy of Art University illustration courses, which allowed me to fullfill my strong wish to get a solid foundation in fine arts and illustration.
Part of my previous work reflects the one-year experience of living in Japan, a period which strongly influenced my cultural background, my tastes and my imagination, leaving pictures in my mind that still emerge into some of my paintings. The works in this stage of my artistic growth often show a dreamlike quality and talk about imaginary people and places.
The birth of my beloved daughter, three years ago, apparently caused an interruption of the artistic flow, only to bring about a strong revolution in my style, concerning both the materials used and the choice of colour and format.
My artistic research in the previous years, in fact, led me to look for a technique that synthesized strong colour and contrast with decorativism. This research wasn’t followed by the outcome I was looking for, until I started painting again and found the wonderful, healing power of what I call my “Textile Art”.
When I was a young girl with plenty of leisure time I used to embroidery scenes and motives in quite a pictorial way. The process was very slow but usually led to high-impact results, which I somehow longed to blend with my “painter side”, going beyond mere craftmanship .
I’ve always been so caught by the possibility to touch and feel the matter I used with my fingers that I almost doubted whether I should have learnt sculpting instead of painting.
I found the answer when I recently started to work with collage. My collage works are not made of paper but of fabric: many colourful pieces of fabric that I carefully choose according to the effect I want to achieve and glue together to build colour transitions, tones and decorative effects.
This technique is just tailored on my personality, because it allows me to test many colours and tones onto the “painting” surface ( which is usually fabric or canvas) and rapidly shift from one piece to another until I get the desired effect. It both satisfies my need to feel the painting matter and to immediately react to the colour solutions I repeatedly test.
Moreover, using patterned fabric leaves the way open to unpredictable effects, which is the really fun part of the process
