Art of Simplicity When Fables Have a Bitter Taste Rar

I recently had the pleasance of being featured in taiwan's DPI magazine, in what ended upwardly being a iv folio interview/spread (!!) and where i of my illustrations even made the forepart encompass.

here is the interview in english. I promise my experience can encourage immature illustrators, struggling in what is an overwhelming earth of images.

Dpi: You lot studied philosophy at university. How did you lot start your artistic journey and get an illustrator? When did you become interested in art?
F: I have e'er been interested in art. My father had a natural talent in drawing which he never really explored, only he encouraged us to practice then. My Honours thesis was in Aesthetics. I planned to movement back to Italy later on Academy and start another course of study at the academy of fine arts of Rome, but life took me elsewhere. I travelled for a few years and in that time I realized I didn't want to continue with academia, simply I didn't know how it was possible to make art for a living. So I taught English for many years after moving back to Italia. It was here in Europe that I discovered picture volume analogy was an art grade, and information technology could also be a job. So I tried difficult to get my work seen by publishers, for years, with picayune issue. My style was immature and I needed to work harder to reach an identity that had significant. I think it was thanks to my documenting those efforts on my blog over the years, that eventually publishers started to detect the work, and then my agent (Kirsten Hall of Catbird), thanks to whom I now piece of work equally an illustrator full fourth dimension. Information technology was an unplanned surprise in life, for me to exist able to practise this.

Dpi: What'due south your drawing philosophy?
F: I don't think I have a philosophy when it comes to drawing. It's very much an instinctive process. Peradventure the question ways what makes a successful image for me. I think fine art is very much well-nigh coherence and beauty and that's what I try to obtain in the finished image. And by beauty I don't mean perfect and pretty pictures, but a balance of opposing forces: the dark, the crooked, the harmonious, the blithesome. It's like the yin and yang I suppose, in Chinese culture. If one is absent, the whole is lacking somewhat.

Dpi: You take been living in different countries. Can you share with united states about your journeys? Did those journeys inspire your work? How?
F: I think the main matter that translates to my piece of work is the abiding search for identity which comes from having grown upwards in two different cultures. We are composites of our lived experience and everything contributes to forming usa every bit people, the skilful and the bad and the contradictory. For me the real journey was the artistic one: finding coherence between all those fragments. From Italia there is the chemical element of my childhood, of origins and family and land. From Australia at that place is the chemical element of adapting to a new identity, of language, of plumbing equipment in, of openness and wide natural spaces. From Europe in general there is the chemical element of history, of the layers of onetime and new that coexist here: of folk art, of music, of faith, of a long tradition of art which permeates children's book illustration all across the continent, which has had a tremendous influence on me.

Dpi: Among all of your works, which part is the most challenging e'er to you?
F: The well-nigh challenging part of my work as an illustrator is the white page. The very start of the cosmos of an image is like a nascency, and no nascency is without sweat and tears. Some images are born more easily than others, but some require a more arduous process of trial and mistake and must be reflected upon and destroyed diverse times earlier they feel right.

Dpi: I experience very intimate and a little flake melancholy (in a practiced way) when looking at your work. Tin can you describe your illustrative arroyo and mode?
F: Many people have said this about my work, that it is melancholic or nostalgic. I think it relates to the question of identity from earlier. We bring our identity in the work, which is our life fragments, and at that place is always in my identity every bit an illustrator a nostalgia for the by.

Dpi: I am curious about your artistic process. Tin you talk near it? How practice you start the process of making piece of work?
F: My work today is mainly making moving picture books, which is different from the work of a painter or an artist, who creates for the sake of creating, every bit a pure expression of self. Analogy is closer to a arts and crafts. The center of the work is to tell a story which is instrinsically linked to a written story, but which must also enrich it and get beyond information technology. This is the hardest role of making a picture book: speaking beyond the written text. I start by reading the story many times and reflecting on each part until I go a mental image of how to best illustrate the concept in a way that is non didactic or bland. And so in that location are a series of sketches which are created, and in one case both illustrator and publisher are happy, I keep to the finished image. This is the most fun, where texture and light and playfulness will emerge with the use of colour.

Dpi: What are some major influences on your work? Who inspired you lot?
F: byzantine iconography, modern artists such equally Picasso, Klee, Schiele, then Twombly, Chagall, Hundertwasser. Merely aslo music: Yiddish songs and flamenco and folk from all around the world. I have a huge debt with 1960s illustration, specially the work of Miroslav Sasek, Alice and Martin Provensen, and with the Czech painter Štěpán Zavřel who made magical worlds for children. I am too constantly inspired past writers for children who are perfectly in melody with the inner workings of the child: Gianni Rodari and Astrid Lindgren to name a few.

Dpi: What would yous like to practise adjacent?
F: I would similar to write my ain stories ane day, but my standards are very loftier and I have not notwithstanding matured as a children's writer, which is one of the hardest jobs to exercise. perhaps information technology will happen when I am 80, perhaps never! I certainly hope to be able to do this job for a long time, and to do information technology meliorate and with honesty.

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Source: http://felicitasala.blogspot.com/

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