No Small Parts5/6/2020 0 Comments 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 :)
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Being finally summer and having finalized a lot of working tasks and finally getting out of the house to enjoy the sun... or the rain of Danish summer, I am finally doing my final post on the illustrations I have made for the Efterlignelser song book. In this post I wish to present the creation of two drawings, the first for the song "The song of silence" and then for the song "Dilemma", which is the second-last song in the collection. The lyrics of the song of silence are very interesting as the song is about listening, relationships with people "some we forget, others decide...", growth and memories. "The song of silence, tune your ear: whispering voices and people who grow. Try again if you can hear words sprout in the good ground. ..." The theme with the whispering voices and images of people being forgotten or deciding upon things, being glad about something or growing follow one after the other, in an overwhelming sequence, kind of turbinating around your head, investing you with images. These images well evoked by the lyrics are the whispering voices, to which we must tune our ear in order to listen, not to forget to let the words sprout in the good ground. The lyrics make me think of a vortex of voices, whispering to our ears, it reminds me of the piece of Benjamin Fraser in the Spoon River Anthology, a collection of poems representing a series of epitaphs telling about the lives of the inhabitants of Spoon River, a classic from American literature. I remember reading it while I was in high school and presenting the piece about Benjamin Fraser at the acting classes I was taking. We were asked to find a "not-too short" poem to recite and interpret and to experiment in improvisation exercises, and loved that piece for its strength and dramatic power. Here are the first verses: "THEIR spirits beat upon mine Like the wings of a thousand butterflies. I closed my eyes and felt their spirits vibrating. ..." Having to make an illustration for this song, enabled me to explore further some motives I have been playing around for a while. Starting from the growth and sprouting metafor applied to words, I sought the opportunity to develop my favourite motive of anthropomorphic trees. I recently became fascinated by birch trees and their oval black spots, which to me looked like eyes looking at you wherever you go. I did not become paranoid of my perception of birch trees ;) However, in my illustration I imagined birch trees as the source of the whispering voices with the sun and the sky echoing the voices. So I literally turned the eyes of the birch trees spots into mouths, closed or half opened or biting lips struggling if whispering or not. In the illustration I also added the figure of a teenager, which could remind of a boy but also of a tomboy girl in sport clothes. the figure is leaning on a tree while looking at the sunset, being surrounded and held within the whispering. The second and last drawing I wish to talk about is the one for the song "Dilemma", the second-last in the collection. This is another interesting song, tackling the feeling of time passing by, insecurity and search of self. I should have probably discussed this song with my previous post, dealing with songs on self-discovery journeys and cross-roads. However, I felt that this song was slightly different, as instead of focusing on the spatial dimension of the road ahead (which is referred to nonetheless), it focuses on the passing of time. "Time is up, and time has passed now they will require an answer. What I will choose, so I will miss something, faith is all, that I have." So I found special this time dimension, therefore, I focused my drawing on it. I started thinking of the clock metaphor for passing time, which has been represented in many art works and media, such as: in Salvador Dalì masterpiece "The Persistence of Memory" with its famous melting clocks in the desert, in various representations of the hourglass in Renaissance's painting devoted to the theme of Memento Mori (Remember that you will die), but also the ticking crocodile in Peter Pan and the collection of hourglasses owned by Death in Terry Pratchett's series Discworld, where each hourglass is marking the life of each inhabitant on Discworld. Death can at any time, check on how much time each inhabitant has left to live. I sought inspiration in those motives, which I always found intriguing, I started with the mechanical clock, but I was not satisfied, while I found the hourglass more inspiring. The hourglass is a container, a jar, hence I saw it as a volumetric unit of time, containing our life, as it is articulated through our critical events, decisions, failures and successes (I put failures and success in this order, as I want to be hopeful that we will succeed at last, learning from our failures ;) ). Hence our life journey is contained within the sand running down inside the hourglass. Moreover, the hourglass communicates the passing of life in a more physical and unavoidable fashion, the sand runs down, following the law of gravity, always on one direction, never changing, never moving back, in the same way we age, we can only move forward, always, there is no way back. On the other hand, the mechanical clock with its circularity, communicates a cyclic passing of time. A clock hands move around, always towards one direction, the one of the clock, however, they start back from where they started, after 60 minutes or twelve hours. The clock represents time repeating itself, like the days, the weeks, the months, and the seasons. The mechanical clock seems to me to represent life passing in an abstract way, similar to Hesiod's representation of the human generations, which like leaves die in winter but are reborn in spring. The hourglass instead marks the passing of time in a linear way, downward, in this sense the hourglass made me think of the transition in Greek poetry from Hesiod and Homer and their distant perception of the human generations to Archilochus and his subjective, pessimistic view of the passing of time as a painful process. Therefore, I went for the hourglass seen as circumscribing the time limits of our life, the container of our decisions and the cross-roads we meet in our life and here is the final result. Our home on the top of the little hill, crossing roads departing and reaching home, our refuge from the lightning and the dark clouds of the coming storms. So this was my last post related to the Efterlignelser song series and I thank those dear friends. who kept reading my blog.
From next week, I will start new series of posts with what I call "heroic portraits" of amazing people I know, who are achieving great things in their daily life, and I will document my urban sketching activity posting watercolor sketches and, when possible, pictures of the actual places. |
AuthorFreelance illustrator and painter. Archives
May 2023
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