A SHORT SYNTHESIS OF MY PRINCIPLES,

OF MY WAY OF THINKING AND WORKING,

OF MY PHILOSOPHY OF WORK

Here are my personal thoughts on how I see artistic creation: my journey into the centre of emotions, that I divide into seven steps.

FIRST STEP

We must keep our eyes wide open all the time. We look as widely as possible, and as quickly as possible, in order to capture the maximum information (things, colours, moods. We call this emotions). That is a technique, which can be useful in other domains.

SECOND STEP

We must observe carefully all the details that impressed us the most and that stimulated an emotion in us. We will store those emotions in the back of our minds, in drawings or in small paintings.

THIRD STEP

Now we will open those eyes that can see artistically, in order to choose one of the stored emotions and finally to find the key to create that emotion.

FOURTH STEP

This step is the mental part of the transformation of an emotion. We must delimit, we must REDUCE the chosen emotion within formal bounderies in order to transform it into an artistic work. We have to explore all the possibilities to find the best way to shape this emotion.

Therefore we have to take several basic decisions relating to the choice of the materials and techniques, the dimensions, colours and, of course, we have to decide on the composition, which must be based on different elements. We have to integrate these into a hierarchy developed for that purpose.

Of course an emotion is just a tiny little part, a detail of the whole. A well- composed painting is always a whole. For that reason we must conceive the painting in such a way that the detail in the completed work does not appear anymore simply as a DETAIL but has now become its own WHOLE, opening a door to the infinite.

FIFTH STEP

Now we enter the most difficult phase of artistic creation. We must leave the mental, the “I” and its limits in order to create a mental EMPTYNESS and permit the chosen emotion, the chosen idea to assume in its PUREST APPEARANCE. We have to get rid of everything we think we know, all intellectual concepts we have acquired, that have still remained on the surface. Only when we have achieved this point, will the ESSENTIAL remain, all the essence that we keep in the very depth of our being, all that has become part of us, the river that flows in our innermost self.

We must repeat this process at each new beginning. We must start every time from ZERO.

So, mentally empty, with our innermost eyes wide open, the idea on which we are working can become our truth. Approaching it this way means shaping the idea from the inside, and not from an external, mental calculating WILL. Intellectual choice would cloud the way towards the truth.

Not willing means being “NAKED”, not able to hide anything. Only in this nakedness will we be HONEST, HUMBLE, SIMPLE and TRUE towards ourselves and our work. We must not be afraid if we do not attain the level we wish to reach. Because anyway this nakedness, the UNCONCIOUS part of our personality, which we call the soul, will mark the level of our work and the quality of our artistic language.

A high level can never be reached by force. If we WANT to create a “master-work”, if will inevitably end in “status nascendi”!

SIXTH STEP

The moment we are “empty and naked”, we have access to the heart of the chosen emotion, that has already become an artistic idea. We enter inside this idea, escorted by the creative force we have developed to realize this idea. But here we meet a new force to which we will henceforward be subjected. It is the PRIMORDIAL force, the very own force of that idea.

To reach the truth, our goal, we must advance STEP by STEP on the way, GUIDED by this force, and not on that way we had chosen. In some rare cases both forces from the very beginning will take the same way.

The more sensitive we are, the more our hand will be guided by this primordial force towards the truth.

The emotions awake in us the desire to develop and to shape an artistic idea.

The emotions SERVE us to create works of art, but we must be their SERVANTS to make them visible.

Works of art are bridges connecting the physical reality to the reality of the soul.

These bridges are like the twilight that takes us from day to night.

But these bridges become more and more rare. I think the reason for this is the imbalance in human beings: The mental, intellectual part grows so much, that it hides the soul completely.

Furthermore the intellect is the poorest, the most limited part of us, because it lives on words. And words have limits, like we do, when we use them.

The intellect inibriates us and induces us to “rise” higher and higher, to abandon the earth and to build our own world. But it takes us more and more away from the centre where the eternal secrets are kept.

From up there we can only distinguish the outlines of things. But it is the INSIDE that gives sense, that illuminates the OUTSIDE.

Only when the lost balance is restored we will be able to reach the inside:

ANIMA-SPIRITUS-CORPUS

The soul, the mental and the physical parts must cohabit again in a harmonious balance inside us.

Art can help to restore the balance, so that we may become ONE again. And the flame will be lit again in our hearts.

With a restored balance we can perhaps (if it isn’t already too late) heal the wound we have opened in the cycle of nature, when we have disconnected ourselves from her and started to build our own world.

So these bridges will connect the physical rim, where everything is shape, where everything is circumscribed to the inner rim of the soul, where there are no limits, no borders, where everything is endless without beginning or end, beyond any measure of time.

SEVENTH STEP

This is the physical step. We now proceed to make the idea visible by using materials chosen for that purpose.

Here technique comes into play. Everything I have tried to explain up until now CANNOT be realized without the necessary TECHNIQUE! We can learn, no we must learn, how to use this skill. If we want to reach a good level, we have to work a lot, with tenacity and patience. At the beginning, everything may seem very difficult and boring. We think we will NEVER reach a degree of perfection. But we must persevere throughout our professional lives, even knowing that we may NEVER reach perfection. Perfection is like a rainbow. The more we approach it, the more it recedes. But if you want to see the rainbow, you must accept the rain.The choice of materials and techniques is very wide. For instance: oil, acrylics, tempera, watercolours, pastel, chalk, charcoal, pencil, china ink, woodcut, engraving, lithography, serigraphy and the technique of fresco painting. These are the principals. But there are a lot more.

It is important to know how to use as many techniques as possible. Choosing the best, most appropriate technique is crucial in the making of a work of art. The choice of a given technique depends on various factors. For example, the dimensions of a painting. For a big painting, my choice is always oil on canvas. For smaller ones I prefer working on wood, and for even smaller ones I use acrylics on paper or on wood. In every case my technique consists of painting several transparent layers of colour, always using brushes. This technique has advantages and disadvantages. One advantage is that the brightness of the colours remains unaffected, because the colours are not mixed materially but optically. One disadvantage is the extremely long time it takes to finish a painting. This is because the old layer must be completely dry before the new one is added. The choice of the dimensions of a canvas depends on the idea that one is going to develop. When I have a subject that is peaceful, the size of the canvas can be reduced. But to give full expression to an explosive emotion in the strongest and most direct way, the canvas can never be large enough!

A large painting makes it easier for the viewer to “enter” into it, and to live entirely the emotion.

The technique must not serve itself, but must rather serve and support EXCLUSIVELY the artistic creation!

Through technique we can achieve our own artistic calligraphy. Therefore we must work intensively first on the shapes of things and later on the colours. We must learn to capture the forms with our own eyes, and to reproduce them with our own hands. A symbiosis must evolve between eye and hand.

The best way to develop this close cooperation is to draw the nude. The nude is the BASE. I mean drawing the nude, as I practiced it at the Munich Art Academy. The drawing had to be life-size. We worked three hours a day. For at least two weeks the model remained in the same position and we had the same angle of view. After two weeks she adopted a new position, and we started a new drawing and so on.

With that pattern of activity we learn to observe all the facets of the forms, and how they correspond to each other, to finally put them under “tension”.

A quick sketch, capturing a snapshot of the nude, is something only an artist with a long experience and who knows the body perfectly can do. He must also have a assured artistic calligraphy.

It takes a long time to develop an artistic calligraphy. At the beginning one has real difficulty to reproduce exactly the original forms. The eyes are not yet able to catch the shapes of the things nor the correlation of the volumes to each other, the hands have not yet learned how to follow them.

Then slowly, very slowly with a certain satisfaction we reach a point where the hand starts to reproduce more or less, what the eye sees. But after a certain time, and after a lot of work a distortion arises, modifying the original shapes of the reproduced objects. This distortion is developed on one hand unconsciously by the artist and on the other hand by his curiosity to see how far he can go. This distortion will create the personal calligraphy of the artist and will make him distinct from all other artists.

Technique must be so dominating that the colours used on the canvas must no longer appear as MATERIAL: the MEDIUM must become the MESSAGE.

An emotion that becomes a work of art and attracts the attention of a spectator contains messages. The sense of the messages can only be reached through a door that the spectator himself can open. A work of art has never only one door but several. The higher the level at which the work is perceived, the more doors it will contain, so that every single spectator can find his OWN ACCESS, and get from the message what he is able to.

That is the reason why any personal interpretation of the artist must be seen an assault on the individual perception of the spectator.

It happens sometime that the artist, pushed by the primordial force of the emotion, creates a work of art containing messages that he himself is unconscious of having introduced into the painting.

An emotion always contains a message. A message always contains an emotion. One lives on the other, and vice versa One and the other. One IS the other. EVERYTHING IS ONE.

A painting is considered of a high level when the elements form a UNITY. When the spectator is in front of a unified work its unity will attract his own unity (if he is in balance with himself and with the outside) “hypnotizing” him, rendering him unable to give a DETAILED opinion of the painting. His reaction will be intuitive, coming from the depth of his being and united with the infinite.

And, of course, there will be all the others who, because of their way of thinking, will not be able to see the mosaic but only its stones.