Poetry in lines and colors

this is one of my illustrations winner of the third prize in an Italian Children books Illustration Competition called " La Casa della Fantasia 2011". The topic of the competition was the 150th Anniversary of Italian unification. The title of this illustration is “24 th June 1859” , the date of  the battle in San Martino which took place during the second Italian Independence War. The technique is a mixed media, acrylic and collage on paper. Hope you like it!

This week's Illustration Friday topic suggested me this illustration, which is included in the Sketchbook I am preparing to participate to the Sketchbook Project 2012. By 31st January 2012 my 16-illustrations-sketchbook will leave Italy to join the other thousands sketchbooks from all over the world in the Brooklyn Art Library in New York. From April 2012 all sketchbooks will begin an exciting World Tour... keep in touch for the tour dates...

Long before the Halloween celebration was invented, European literary tradition was populated by scary figures, very often with criminal intentions towards the unhappy kids who came across them. One of these figures is the Baba Jaga, a terrible witch from the Russian popular tradition. Fortunately the little girl was given a magic comb with the power of making trees grow in a second, so she could run away and avoid being baked by the old lady! These two illustrations have been published in  Canada in the volume 100 Illustrations Annual 2011 (Diana Evans Editions)

I think this 1985 drawing fits well with this week’s Illustration Friday topic. “The Awakening o f Mirrors” is freely based upon a short novel by Argentinean poet and writer Jorge Luis Borges. I read this novel long time ago and I can’t remember it very well, I just remember it told about figures in mirrors invading our world and they passed through mirrors at night while every one was asleep. The first living thing that started this surrealist invasion was a fish. For the original drawing I just used china black ink on white paper using a pen nib together with a very thin paint brush. Since I found just a bad quality image of this drawing I revisited it for the submission by adding a computer touch of colour. Hope you enjoy the image!

Italy, the land of opera duets! Violetta and Alfredo in Verdi's Traviata, Puccini's Turandot and Prince Calaf, the exhilarating cats duet by Rossini and many, many others. This is my personal interpretation of this week's topic: it is a sort of intellectual duet, in a timeless setting a man and a woman are sharing some secret we are not allowed to know and behind them, in the dark background, a little window over the things to come...

Those who were kids in the Sixities surely remember long afternoons spent to play with an army of little plastic soldiers. I have never been militarist, so I didn't like those kind of games, but when I had the occasion to illustrate for a competition one of Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales I chose to portrait the little lead soldier: so far from the classic iconography of the soldier and much more similar to a colourful nice toy.

The Cloud Grower. Such an old image! It dates back 1984. I was in my black and white period then... I have two versions of this china-ink drawing. The first featuring the figure of the cloud grower behind the cloud-flower vase. This is the second version and here the cloud grower turns into a butterfly

...the colour version (acrylic and collage on wood)

Pelayo and his wife Elisenda couldn’t believe their eyes when they saw a very old man, ragged and dusty, moving slowly his huge pair of plucked wings in the chicken-run of their gardens. No one knew who he was and from where he came, it looked like he had been knocked down by a storm. He spoke just few words in an unknown, mysterious language. People from every corner of the village came to see this strange phenomenon, some of them mocked him, children kept throwing things to him, to see how he looked like in a standing position. A neighbour of the couple said he was an angel, but even the village priest looked at him with suspicion because he couldn’t understand a single word in Latin. Day after day the miserable creature bore with patience the malign attention of visitors, while Pelayo and Elisenda built themselves a new house with the earnings that came from ticket sales to every one who came to see him. After a short time, a more incredible creature appeared in the village: a ...

After the Second World War and until the late sixties, some homeless families occupied a few houses inside the court yard of my hometown castle, overlooking the lake. Among them my grandparents, who lived in a couple of rooms on the ground floor and in the walls you could still see the holes made by bombs. To me and my cousins this place was the most intriguing place in the world and during the long summer afternoons we used to play and invent stories in the lonely and dark rooms of the castle. Some years ago I found in a book an old photograph of that court yard, and the déjà-vu image inspired me this painting, mixing the memory of the fascinating place with the reminiscence of the fire-works shows called ‘the castle on fire’ that took place every year in September, during the Saint John feast. The result looks like an alien invasion of the place!

my 2011 New Year resolution: find more time to read some good books, nourishment of creativity…