The concept
The eye sees, my mind revises and the hand sketches.
The important is not to lose the instant! I start working in this way. I need a quick sketch, in order to not forget (you know, sometimes the memory fails). A piece of torn paper helps me to fix my inspirations (better, if I keep my notebook handy; at least, it doesn’t finish in the washing machine!). When I get a moment’s peace, usually at home, I sketch the colours too. But there is no preciseness now, I don’t need it.
If not commissioned, the subjects are pure necessity. I don’t follow current fashions or trends. I make what I desire, what I like, what it’s stimulating. A memory, a view, a fleeting glance, a sentence, a music, a mood.
One day, while I was walking along the side of a road, a bus passed me by; from the window, there was a girl with a fix glance and the headphones. I asked myself: “ What is she thinking about? Where reality is she avoiding from?”. That’s how “Illusione (Illusion)” was born.
The sketch
The sketch has no expiry date. It can stay unused for a long time and brush it up at the right moment. But sometimes, I’m impatient to throw myself into a new project and I immediately want to start a new mosaic.
After the sketch, I pass it in a more detailed drawing, but not too accurate and, according to the details I have to reproduce, I decide the size of my work. There is a continuous exchange of relations between two different languages: the imagination (what you want to express) and the synthesis (typical of this tecnique). As a mosaicist, I must consider the relation between the size of the tile and the size of the entire work. I must make the work easier to me.
Synthesis is the strength of the mosaic art
The synthesis starts: now, the great effort is to eliminate all the useless details, the surplus. A stroke or a n outline, for example, becomes a line with an exact thickness that will become made of tiles. I must consider the areas of the colours. Bigger is be the work, more you can increase the changing of tones and get more shades. But in the drawing it is better not to use precise colours, because there’s a limit in the range of a mosaicist. The Venetian smalti are limited and the stones offer what it is given from mother nature.
That’s the great power of this art: to convey concepts, sacrificing the photographic realism.
