Doing this one, two, three, four, ten times, twenty times, thirty times and every time trying to find a solution from a little different point of view, in order to finally breakthrough and be able to make something with apparent effortlessness.īernardo Siciliano, being self-taught, how did you build up your knowledge of painting and composition? 20 times I draw the same apple in a stupid composition, just focusing on trying to build up volume and depth and then after the drawing I make a small painting. But that’s the result of a huge amount of effort, and I translated that approach into painting, for example trying to make a drawing of an apple. When you learn the piano and there is a difficult passage you play that passage millions of times until it feels effortless, flawless, very fluid. I now see a lot of new generation painters working in that direction. After a century of modernism, we are getting into this phase of postmodernism, which is a big and quite vague container in which painting representational images is becoming welcome. We are in the first half of the 21st century, and if I look at the history of art every century goes against the flow of the previous one. Most contemporary art is abstract but your work is figurative?
It’s becoming a familiar type of image that suddenly needs to be painted. In order for me to make a painting I need to be in front of that subject matter, sometimes for years, without even thinking of making a painting. I paint what I see around me with my eyes, and I also need a certain type of emotional connection with what I see. When I was just a child I understood that I need reality.
You can listen to the podcast of this interview here.īernardo Siciliano, why did you decide to be a painter?Īs a young child I studied the piano, but I secretly loved painting way more than playing the piano.