The Accordionist Painting

Lucia Tripepi was born and brought up in Italy in a household full of people and animals which supplied endless amounts of inspiration. She never trained as an artist, but she can't remember a time when she wasn't drawing. She raised her family in Greece, in a small village by the sea. All the while she never stopped drawing. Stray cats and dogs, goats, donkeys and local people depicted in a satirical manner with the vivid colours of the Mediterranean became the subject of her work. Art materials were hard to come by in her isolated village, so Lucia developed a flexibility with the media she used, and continues to use. She loves ink and oil but is also happy to work in acrylic and crayon, in fact, anything she finds to hand. It was in Greece that her art truly developed as she started selling her paintings to make a living and having her first exhibitions. In Greece Lucia found the same strong source of inspiration that had deeply affected her imagination as a young girl in Calabria. Bright light, strong colours and the sparkling sea inspired the use of a vivid palette even though her pictures were rarely landscapes. Lucia now lives on the edge of the Cotswolds, in the UK. She exhibits regularly as well as working on commissions and book illustrations. The Mediterranean, where she is always happy to return, is still a huge source of inspiration