Just by a stroke of luck, like the band Garbage's song, I was invited to be part of the #TriesteSketchers group, by two wonderful women artists. In this way, I found myself involved in this fantastic initiative, which has gathered sketchers from Italy, including my hometown of Vercelli, and from other countries to create and share beauty during the lockdown period. I really had to rush in order to post my drawings ;) but it was all worth the effort! A spirit of solidarity and collaboration has pervaded our cooperation online and now I will order to two copies, for me and my parents, who do not have Internet connection and can seldom look at my works and activities. If you wish to support this initiative, the publication of a Carnet, displaying a selection of our drawings from the lockdown, you can participate in the crowdfunding campaign following this link: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/757687667/esketchamodacasa?ref=project_facebook&fbclid=IwAR0S6xdpQSZG1l_R38YrN-YzYRfY3pvlc-CkwinZl03Z2qXQ2XDTZfyTDbA If you want you can also read bout the upcoming publication on my Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/emanuela.marchetti.73/posts/10158392131646952?notif_id=1590514092381492¬if_t=feedback_reaction_generic And here is the link to the Trieste Sketchers Group page on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/urbansketcherstrieste/permalink/2828773543838880/ For me this is my third publication as illustrator, an activity that I wish to pursue in more professional terms, but it is also an unforgettable experience, in a period that will be in our history books. I share a couple of drawings I have selected for the Carnet. The first you see is a repost, I apologize for that, but it depicts the last coffee my husband and I had in a cafè, outside our home just before the lockdown. The figure sitting in front of me with the blue jumper and his coffee is in fact my husband. This is a urban sketch, made with markers, and to me it became symbolic of life before the lockdown and of the feelings of many people affected by lockdown policies, remembering their life before. Now we are ready to slowly go back to our life and I wish to go back to that little cafè in Svendborg and maybe do another sketch to celebrate a new start of life. I presented this second drawing to the group for the theme:torments. It represents a hamster washing carefully her hands, the tongue showing how hardly concentrated she is on that task. That hamster is me during lockdown, trying to do things right, but messing a little things up ;)
The torment for me was to constantly wash my hands avoiding to bite my nails afterwards. I did a series of hamsters during the first period of the lockdown, in order to represent in a funny and cute way, the daily struggles we had to go through, making fun of myself, as a way to spread empathy and humour among my network of friends and colleagues and whoever saw my illustrations online. I decided for the hamster in response to Mette Fredriksen, prime minister of Denmark, and her warning that "there is not need to hamster (goods)!", meaning to avoid stockpiling. I just started laughing it was such a funny image, I pictured in my mind groups of hamsters panicking through the supermarkets of Denmark, I had to draw this! So I created Ingefær-Inge, a ginger red she-hamster, representing me in Denmark dealing with the new prescriptions, and And yes I love red hair and red hamsters are insanely cute ;) So I thought that this drawing would be a good addition to the Carnet - collection of our drawings, which will be soon published by the group of sketchers. I hope that a lot of people will support the initiative and to be part of other similar projects as an illustration.
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A new publication is on its way :)
In the past weeks being Denmark and Italy locked down, I have participated in the sketching activity of the group Trieste Sketchers. A nice art community on Facebook, gathering artists from Italy but also from other countries, or like me, Italians who are based abroad. We have sketched freely or following prompts proposed by the group, in the sketch above you can see a marker sketch I made of My Breakfast, one of the themes proposed by the group. The subject is of course homemade pancakes with yoghurt and fruit and coffee with milk, prepared by my lovely husband ;) We used a bit of our time during lock down to draw and share drawings online and now the organisers of the group are ready to collect our drawings, 10 for each artist and create a publications, or as they call it a Carnet of illustrations. I was invited to the project by a nice lady painter from Vercelli, my hometown in Italy and by a newly met friend from the internet who is based in Trieste and an active founder member. The world is small indeed ;) I feel very happy and honoured to be part of this initiative as it is promoting art as a craft and as a way to gather people around the world. Last but not least, this work brings to quote three my published work, I am not working to collect my 10 drawings for the publication, time is running. To find out more about the Trieste Sketchers group and view our beautiful drawings, please visit their Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/groups/urbansketcherstrieste/ Here we are at the third song from the book Efterlignelser, Dead Seed. Interestingly, another edgy title, which reminded me of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. ;) The song starts with a mustard seed found on the ground, which suddenly started to sprout. It reached the stars and ended with a huge, glorious tree, soon populated by the birds' nests. The tree recalls to the protagonist, a young boy or girl, memories of what her grandma said: that everything that grows gives seeds and should be harvested to enjoy! Underneath you can see the final version of my illustration. This song was just perfect for me, it gave me the opportunity to turn into a professional work, the many trees I have worked in the past years. I had of course limitations, as my illustrations were supposed not to be enormous or not to take too much room away from the score and the lyrics, yet I could not believe it, I was offered the opportunity to introduce my favourite theme of all, trees and why not? A lady tree! To my eyes, the little mustard seed was sprouting and giving birth to a glorious, new born lady tree. In my illustration I tried to show the temporal development of the seed from front to back from present to future or from past to present, from the seed in front of everything to the sprout to the fully grown tree and the birds' nests. I tried to mark this distinction through my use of color, keeping warmer colors closer to the viewer and colder bluish shades moving away from the viewer, towards the future of the fully grown tree. So even if the tree is brown, typically a warmer color, I tried to stick to darker and colder shading, using blue for the darker areas. At the same time, the warmer shades of brown, make the tree pop from the background, focusing the attention to the feminine body of the lady tree and the face. Her face is again just suggested, aiming to the sky and melting into it when reaching the plan of her closed eyes of the tree. This was also an attempt to suggest a grandmother who might not be present anymore, maybe up there in the sky. My interest for trees started quite early, when I was about 12 I started exploring sketching natural forms and I was influenced by surrealistic painters, my favourite being: René Magritte, Max Ernst, Paul Delvaux and some works of Salvador Dalì. I was also very much in love with the illustration style of Alan Lee and Arthur Rackham. At the same time I was fascinated by botanic illustrations, I loved the fact that being often in watercolor, they showed transparent, see-through shading, the cleanliness and precision of line, which to be honest, I am quite sure I will never be able to achieve. However, I found a bit frustrating how this amazing technique was not used to imagine the impossible, to emancipate those natural forms to something more than what they are, but take them to what they could be, what they could suggest to the human imaginative eye. Moreover, me as a young girl dance was a great part of my life. I danced for many years, classical ballet and then contemporary dance. I loved them both, the strength and Apollonian precision of ballet and the freedom and Dionysiac expressiveness of contemporary dance. As a young girl I was fascinated by the Surrealistic principle that art should be the expression of the unconscious, the Freudian Es, but I liked it to be narrative and intelligible, I was not a fan of the chaos of abstract painting, which I found frustrating. In this sense loved the works of the surrealists, who were able to combine these dimensions in their works. In a way I was aiming at a synthesis, fragments of unconscious and of reality, a blending of the Dionysiac and the Apollonian. I felt each of them alone would not be enough, the Dionysiac would just be uninteresting chaos and the Apollonian alone would just be boring order. Anyhow, dance was a big influence in me and drove me to see contorted dance poses in nature forms: trees, bushes and plants in general. I was especially fascinated by wood, the trunks of trees, their texture, veins, and wrinkles. To me trees started looking like creatures captured and crystallised in wild existential dance, full of life yet painful and meditative. My trees are always transcending reality, they are internally oriented towards their unconscious. They are themselves fragments of my unconscious, like trees I show you here. Wherever I go or travel, I collect images of trees. I take photos of them, sketch them on the spot, elaborate them later into actual paintings, digital or watercolor. I don't think I have enough time in my whole life to paint them all. But I have a dream, more than doing exhibitions, I dream of creating books about my travel diaries on the trees from the world that I encountered, for instance in different places in Europe, America and Asia. The trees represented above are from Taiwan, where jungle trees can be found on the side of any urban streets and are simply amazing.
But who knows, who would ever be interested in such books? Who would buy them? Or should I just release them online? I still have to make up my mind, but the question stands, who would be interested? ;) Raquel, Crazy Hat - that is the title of the second song in the collection "Efterlignelser", probably my favourite text in the collection. Raquel is amazingly radical, punk. I must say, I was puzzled to find her in the collection, what was she doing there? Raquel is a young girl wondering in the woods in the middle of the night, walking among statues that have been abandoned by doves, the beautiful white birds symbolising purity, peace and innocence, the same bird I have inserted in the illustration of the first story, marking the boundary between the real world and heaven. Doves have left the woods, while Raquel is entering it. Raquel is brave, strong, determined, not looking for innocence or purity, but willing to explore the world, including her own dark sides. She made me think again of William Blake and how he wrote the Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, contrapposing the innocence of children with experienced way of lives of adults, who have been in the world, their corruption and repression. As I moved to Raquel, from the little stone containing heaven, I felt like moving from one side to the other of Blake's universe, from innocence to experience, but Raquel is not corrupted nor repressed, she is aware, confident, daring. I imagined Raquel as a novel heroine, like the Esther in Sylvia Plath's "The Bell Jar" or the woman Orlando, the eponymous protagonist of one of my favourite works by Virginia Woolf. However, despite acknowledging the epic stature of Raquel, I was not sure how to face her portrayal, especially reminding that the book was for early teenagers. Raquel seemed hard to grasp, so I started from re-elaborating a couple of subjects I have been working on for several years: the womanly forest and the anthropomorphic-monster fruit. You can see one of my fruit-motives on the watercolor shown above on the right, a rose hip frozen in snow. That subject is based on the many frozen rose hips I saw around the university in my PhD years, during which we had a few very cold winters, with prolonged periods of snow, which I enjoyed :)
There were plants of roses in the park around the university, blooming wildly during summer, but severely plagued by winter ice. However, the ice brought up something beautiful about the rose hips, they were elevated into dramatic dancers, contorting themselves as if suffering the cold wind bending them on their stem, fighting to stand up, fighting to survive. Above on the left, you can see how I tried to combine the fruit and the womanly forest motives in an initial digital sketch. I imagined that the trees also were suffering, dramatic figures, as if trapped in a painful dance. In this way, I wanted to allude at the statues of the text of the song, those statues abandoned by doves for the night. I then imagined that the the statues were in fact women, crystallised into trees. Moreover, the song says that the forest is on fire and that fruits of the color of blood, could grow from a kiss of Raquel. Therefore, I drew a glowing forest, inflamed by fire-like fruits, hanging from the womanly trees. However, as the motive was already strong, I tried to give the fruit a peaceful expression, seen from the profile, as if it was sleeping. I was especially satisfied by the color contrast, the cold and the warm shades reminded me of portrayals of fires in the night in some Pre-Raphaelite paintings. However, something was missing, it was Raquel! I was still juggling with the notion of how to introduce punk Raquel to my young audience, what would I think of my daughter if she wanted to be Raquel? When I myself am quite innocent and retrieving in my childish inner self for refuge, from the world of experience. So I was not totally satisfied with my work. Then I had a chance to hear from the writer and she told me that she imagined Raquel as a homeless girl, wondering in the night in rough clothes, carrying her stuff in plastic bags and holding a jug of blood. The was a vivid image, it gave me strength and inspiration and drove me to imagine Raquel as the punk radical she was supposed to be. I wanted to make Raquel authentic as a real teenager, so why not? My ultimate inspiration was my creative daughter Alexandra, I took inspiration from our conversations, her new radical haircut, her clothing, and her positive attitude. Through Alex I realised that even though Raquel is a radical character, she does not need to be gloomy, she can have a positive attitude, facing the dark sides of the world, carrying a jug blood and yet smiling at herself while admiring the glowing fruits that could grow from her kiss, from her inner herself. Hence I imagined my girl, and also other girls, who might get a glimpse of the many wonderful things they could do in their life, reflecting their own inner self in the glowing forest of their future achievements. I am starting a new little artistic project, a project of portraits. The project is named "No Small Parts", the title is inspired by a famous quote from Konstantin Stanislavski, one of the fathers of modern theatre, who said: "There are no small parts, only small actors." This project is dedicated to great women I know, who are making it big in their everyday life, for themselves and for others. I see these women as actively creating big parts for themselves, making a difference for others, no matter what their job is and how famous or celebrated they are in what they do. I have been amazed and impressed by their growth, so I want to celebrate them with watercolour portraits and to be shared them among my network and on the Internet. I must admit that this little project of mine is my little, personal war against the cult of celebrity, as a concept in itself and also in relation to the people who become celebrities. The term comes originally from the Latin celeber, an adjective meaning: celebrated, famous, renowned. Typically the assumption is that people, who have done something remarkable, who have achieved greatness in their lives are celebrated by society and the media, therefore they become celebrities. Celebrities are typically found in performers like actors, models, pop singers, rich people or TV personalities, and athletes, for some reasons this often involves the publication of nude pictures. On the other hand, a lot of people are really achieving some greatness in their lives, putting efforts in what they do everyday, making a difference for others and go unnoticed, well I think this is unfair! Therefore, even though I myself am not famous and do not aspire to be it, nonetheless I want to celebrate the ones I personally know, for a sake of justice ;) So my plan is to publish watercolor portraits of women, who are making something great of their potentially small parts, at least according to the media landscape. I call these portraits "heroic portraits" as I aim at showing their greatness and not so much their physical beauty, strength of character and confidence, at times introducing surreal elements to enhance their greatness. In so doing I am inspired by the tradition of Greek Classical art, trying to portrait humans in their heroic quality, however, in my portraits I won't cover heroic nudity ;) My subjects will be fully dressed and engaged in their working environment. The first portrait I wish to post is about my cousin Donatella Morra, the blond lady on the right, who is working as a nurse in Vercelli, my hometown in Piedmont in the north-western part of Italy. She has been extremely busy this year (2020) during the Covid-19 pandemic. Donatella has always been like a big sister to me, since I was a child and she was a teenager. She has always shown self-confidence and character, she decided to go back to her studies as an adult, leading her to work in the maternity ward of Vercelli hospital. I have always respected her decision to start a new education as an adult, which can be very hard. But she made it and here she is now. I have painted Donatella, the blond lady on the right, with her friend and colleague Arianna, the brunette lady on the left, based on a selfie they sent me as reference. In this painting I wanted to be faithful to their working environment, working clothing, the masks that they are wearing, which will become a symbol of 2020 and the pandemic we survived, in a heavily locked-down Italy. But more than ever, I wanted to paint the strength and livelihood I saw in her eyes, which was capturing me since when Donatella sent me her picture. I am not sure I have made it, I am still learning to make portraits and I know I have still a lot to learn, but I feel proud to have started to play my small part, to help these two awesome women to show the greatness of the part they play everyday in the hospital. What has been most challenging in the portrait is that they are both smiling under their masks, the smile was clearly visible through the muscular tension of their faces and their eyes, I am afraid I did not succeed in capturing their smiles, but I am proud of how confident and strong, they appear in my portrait, truly heroic ladies. Here you can see the initial sketches :) Dear All,
As promised I am posting one of my illustrations from the songbook "Efterlignelse". The song talks about a kid, could be a boy or a girl, who finds a little stone in the street, laying there on asphalt. The stone shines like a mother of pearl bead. The kid collects the stone from the street as if it was a found treasure. The stone is very special, as the kids look at the stone, it shows and it is very special, while looking at the stone, the kid can see heaven, getting immersed in thousands of dreams and fantasies. The song conveys a simple image, a kid holding a stone in one hand, however, it also conveys complex meaning of spiritual and individual value. I imagine the kid as a dreamer, able to see the greatness of heaven in one little object, while looking at the stone, the kid is actually looking into herself or himself. The stone acts as a reference for the real world surrounding the kid of marvels to be discovered, but it also triggers dreams and imagination, laying inside the kid, to be projected on the real world around, specifically on the newly found stone. Reading the song, I imagined the kid as a dreamer, looking at the stone but actually seeing herself through her own fantasies, finding herself in a newly found stone. The stone in my eyes becomes a vehicle for self discovery as the kid "searches and finds" says the song. This text made me think of Marcel Proust and his objects, triggering his memories and then acting as vehicles for introspection. But even more, this song reminded me of William Blake's "Auguries of Innocence", which starts: "To see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower". I might add " and a Heaven in a Stone"! Remembering my previous studies in English literature, according to Blake this ability of finding the infinitely grand into the small is the virtue of poets and children and this song inspired me to look back at Blake and realising that this happens to me, everytime I see all my dancing, contorted, tortured figures in natural forms. I am not sure I am really a poet, but I know I have a Peter Pan Syndrome and I have never wished to grow up ;) It took me a few trials to find a satisfying composition for this motive, so I worked at multiple sketches before I could come out with something at least reasonable. In my illustration I wanted to show the duality between the immense infinity of heaven, all captured in the enclosed smallness of the hand of a kid holding a small stone. The Grand and the Small coming together through the dream of a kid, finding a treasure in the street. I imagine the small hand holding the mother of pearl stone, which is shining and spreading a surreal light around, turning the kid's hand into a luminous white with blueish shadows. But then I wanted to enclose in the stone an image of heaven and I was quite uncertain about it, so I leverage some traditional symbols attached to heaven, like: the sky, clouds, feathers and wings. So I drew the sky, soft clouds and a dove, a symbol of peace carrying angel wings. But then heaven for a kid should be fun, it should reflect values of play and enjoyment, therefore, I have added a swing hanging down a rainbow. That was really my childhood nostalgia emerging ;) Finally the dove is spreading her wings on the rim of the stone, hanging in between the stone inside, the fantasy of the kid, and the outside, the real world. In this sense, the dove is spreading her wings, ready to fly towards heaven inside the stone or to leave the realm of fantasy, as one wing is reaching the real world, outside the stone. And isn't this the dilemma we all face when we become teenagers? As we face a challenge when accepting to have to leave childhood behind and spread our wings towards the unknown realm of adulthood, with all its challenges. As for me, I still miss childhood and I try to keep room for play and dreaming in my adult life. |
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May 2023
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