Strolling or to stroll is a term to refer to a walk without any clear destination or purpose that underlines the process itself rather than the reach of a landing place – an activity I found joyful as it goes beyond its explicit sense and describes in a single word the many shades of a practice of mine to harvest impressions for the works awaiting me in the studio.
Those walks happen around 1-2-3 o’clock in the afternoon when oil paint needs to dry and pencils are no longer sharp, when I tend to get overwhelmed and in a need to detach from the drawings – then I go for a stroll purposely to notice: nothing in particular and everything there is to see. Lasting about half an hour the walk can and usually pass with no events at least in the common sense of what is found worth sharing; I do indeed come back to my work refreshed and often even with solutions to explore in the remaining hours of natural light interrupted solely by a habit to look out of the window into the abandoned garden in front of the studio. It’s a bush gone wild waiting like numerous areas in town to be consumed into one of many anonymous buildings: a modernized version of a city look from the past and an atmosphere far from literature’s flâneur that pushes to crave the opposite: beyond the urban periphery right before and just a bit outside town where the unique thing to appear is a vague, liquid portion of land.
Open, empty and silent the field requires nothing from a passenger other than perceiving the scenery and I do; bringing the impressions with me back at home, in the living room where my studio and paper is. On good days I manage to paint 10 variations representing the field – not the one I saw but how it made me feel through its image; unclear and undefined as if seen through movement (because sometimes I am passing leaning on the car window which is a different way of seeing and a chance to go further and experience larger areas that slightly ever change) because a landscape seen is figurative but a landscape felt is abstract and I seek to stay in the washed line between those two. When I am ready to be concrete as I yet need it, I rely on the edge of a pencil and the deposition of the impressions gained. In order to make them mature the answer is again in the middle afternoon walks in town that will make me confront my work with an evolved approach afterwards. Despite the current winter months I am not always alone on the street – rarely and if the day is lucky I happen to meet an animal, often a lost or abandoned creature I portray to memorise its existence: this, resumed but also overly explained, is the physical and emotional environment in which I worked on six pieces elaborated in January and February: Dilemma, The Unobtrusive doll, Intrusive thoughts, Implantation, Puddle egress and Family tree.
I enjoy thinking about those images as seen during a walk throughout the field that never really happened; a quiet wander inside the imaginary to surpass the idea of what is considered real and material and be able to confront visuals without prejudice and perceive them as credible just like the absurdity of dreams is never doubted in its truness. Stroller not just outside, exploring streets and nature but also back home, in the studio, inside the artworks…
Must be the field that made me suggest in such a vague manner and it manifested in the artworks not solely in the interest and the subjects represented but also in the inclination to hypothetically imagine events like in Puddle egress, which is involved inside an artwork sequence about the eventual existence of hidden objects to discover located somewhere in the field; or The Unobtrusive doll which is a second artwork following the movement of a doll through landscapes. Specifically for this piece I discovered a solution to embody technically what my concept contains and it was done with transparent tape – an evolution of an instrument frequently present in the process which functioned inside Intrusive thoughts (Imaginary friends) as well. Back in the transition of the first two months of the year for me it was restful with the status of a habit to draw tiny figures, delicate to cut out and requiring heavier paper in order to survive: in both artworks these are indirectly present through a transparent tape rectangle inserted additionally to the paper sheet. All six pieces are executed in different paper types varying in weight which is a methodology I value for how it diversifies and unrich the process in sense of texture, approach and decision taking not unlike choosing the right colour. The divergent reaction of each automatically needs a change in the treatment according to its necessities making the process less predictable and more curious. In this period I welcomed long afternoons of attentive cutting on the living room wooden floor where I usually develop and finalise the majority of my artworks. Exception of that standard is the dining table which I prefer for drawing as it distances me from the paper chaos on the floor while also offering stability and concentration to turn into the artistic office needed for drawing the elements to take part in the artworks – day by day I invade more and more room, over placing paper all around my space until there is no more surface to cover.
In this route of rituals the months passed through six artworks completed and many yet to elaborate, fruit of daily drawing and walking which are two different ways to reflect on life; and if an artwork is considered a depiction of how one goes through life, it will be easy to connect an afternoon stroll on a street or a path made by people walking the same route over again to a visual piece as the experience human beings share through a lifetime.