The minute before Painting

Italian mixed media painter living and working in London since 2005. Her work is inspired by her travels and is about the experience of a landscape. Rather than presenting a topographical reality, she abstracts the landscape through her memory and sensory impressions. Her paintings are the synthesis of colours, light and forms seen and experienced in a place in a certain weather or season. By deconstructing and isolating key elements of a landscape she challenges our assumptions of what landscape means to us. Stefania doesn’t work from photographs or preparatory sketches but it’s her selective memory to suggest elements, colours and structure of that specific slice of earth to depict - a slice that she builds up in layers with an expressive style in a visceral manner. The compositions unfold over a period of time through the process of adding and removing marks, by balancing intuitive gestures with considered refinement. Stefania works in a number of mediums including acrylic, ink, watercolour, collage and oil pastel and uses any experimental tool that can leave unpredictable marks on the surface, such as found and discarded objects, old linens, recycled materials, bird feathers, twigs and stones.