Landed

And I started again. It always happens like this: what used to exalt me is no longer enough. At the beginning I resist, I try to find the balance, I tell myself it’s a passing feeling, then this thing grows inside me until I surrender. Giving up control, that’s one thing an artist cannot do without.

“what you think of me” July 2002

Hold tightly and you will give birth to stiff, sad children; every time you look at them you will feel a deep sense of unease. Lose yourself within, let an invisible hand guide what you do, and you will create something magical, a mirror in which everyone sees something of themselves, changing, insinuating, something you won’t hate.

At the threshold of half a century I felt it was time to give myself what I had always wanted, for which and with which I was born, to which I have always aspired, and which has always been denied me, first by those I trusted more than anyone else, and then by myself or rather by the me that repeats the learned patterns.

clapboard, February 2005

In the first feverish fifty years of my burbling life, I painted, photographed, modeled clay and wire, drew (I mostly drew), but everything I did left my stomach tighter than when I started, until I accidentally discovered embroidery art. From there to the first timid self-taught attempts to embroider strange things on everything within my reach was a snap.

illustration for the storyboard of the dance show “il Moro”, April 2004

In this blog I will tell the path I will take, how I will approach it, and why, through embroideries and some dystopian tales. Art in all its shades, especially in the everyday, in old things, in abandoned houses, in words, in plants, in front of our eyes every day.

Maybe someone with the same disposition as me will feel less lonely than I did, surrounded by pragmatism, disenchantment, and the wise advice of those who would have liked to do it and didn’t because being an artist is not a job, it’s a hobby. And he’s been miserable all his life.