Vast and Strange Lands (from La Jolie Rousse, Apollinaire, 1918) Painting

Mara lives and works in Italy in the province of Modena. She began to paint with determination from 1980 to 1995, continuing to study piano; doing some exhibits, personal and collective. She then resumed continuously from 2008. She didn't follow a formal artistic education , but her natural eclectic spirit, led her to express herself as spans a range of media including: installations of leaves-painted sculptures; words on silk panels; ceramic pots; pillow-talking objects; large oil paintings. Her colors are bright, bold, colorful and sunny; her style ranges from expressionism-abstract to figurative-revisited, maintaining a constant freedom of expression over time. She has exhibited in Italy and since 2018 has some collectors in the U.S. Extended history Over the years, I still continue to research and experiment with the same spirit of the beginnings, and now also with a deeper psychic awareness, about creativity: 'Keeping the creative current clear' (C.P.Estés). The subject matter of my work is often poetry and literature, that inspire me to represent, in different ways, some poetic compositions; but also songs, words, quotations, everything which captures me in one casual moment. My themes are: love, nature, feelings, sensations, thoughts. It leads me to a certain libertarian spirit, that aside from reflecting my indole, it born from the passion for Surrealism, understood as a philosophy of life: "poetry, art, love... the surrealist game..., the principle of pleasure on reality..." (Arturo Schwarz, Milano 2009). Reading A. Schwarz, I noticed that the artists I had always loved, all had a common thread leading to Surrealism. Apollinaire, J. Mirò, G.Moreau, Kandinsky, Chagall, Duchamp, they are all among the precursors of the Surrealism. I express myself in different ways: as painting lotus leaves with oil colour; or painting on large canvas portraits; representing a surrealistic poetry with dream images, a bit abstract and a bit ricognizable shape. I also like silk and make many collages with it, in mixed media; or even to create real 'talking cushions' in silk, like art objects that hide their sense in a literary story, to be discovered, inside them, just like ' surrealistic game'. I also like inks and water colour, used in informal style, but always representing a theme, a title, a wrote word, one formal element at least.