How and why did you start your artistic path?

I started painting as a child, fascinated by the simple and natural gesture of my mother, who painted in the early hours of the morning.

Over time, that fascination became a personal need: to collect emotions, preserve traces of beauty, and give form to what often escapes words. In my work, in fact, I seek listening more than control, allowing the work to emerge slowly and carry with it fragments of memory, experience, and transformation.

How did you discover your medium and why did you choose it?

Over the years, I explored different expressive forms beyond painting, such as working with clay, creating small bronze jewellery, and modelling felt on ancient wooden blocks for the making of hats.

At that time, my professional life moved within the field of vision and visual perception, while my inner life continued to search for a freer and more creative space in which to express itself.

Slowly, I understood that colour was the language that, more than any other, could convey the complexity of emotions and human experiences, with all their nuances.

In this ability to evoke rather than describe, I recognised my own way of expressing myself.

The choice of painting was also a return to my origins. The memory of my mother painting left within me a silent but profound imprint. Perhaps, without being fully aware of it, I chose colour because it was already part of my gaze upon the world.

Today, however, what continues to stimulate me most is research. Although I have found in colour my mother tongue, I do not consider the medium a definitive choice, but rather a tool in continuous evolution. For this reason, I continue to experiment, exploring digital media, manual image processing, and the encounter between different techniques. I am interested in the dialogue between gesture and technology, between matter and image, between what is born from intuition and what emerges through processes of transformation.

More than belonging to a specific language, I am fascinated by the possibility of discovering ever-new forms through which to make visible what I do not yet know about myself and the world around me.

Can you tell us about your creative process? How does a work come to life? How long does it take? When do you understand that it is finished? 

My creative process rarely begins from a defined project. More often, it starts from a suggestion, an emotional tension, a fleeting image, or a sensation that asks to emerge.

The first phase is almost always impulsive and intuitive: a moment of strong concentration in which colour, gesture, and matter follow one another rapidly, guided more by instinct than by reason.

This initial immersion is followed by an equally important phase: distance. I need to let the work settle, to step away from it for a time that can vary from days to weeks. It is a sort of decantation, during which the work continues to act silently, even in my absence.

When I return to observe it, my gaze is different. A phase of listening and dialogue with the work itself then begins: I add, subtract, correct, and search for new chromatic balances or small accents capable of bringing out what is not yet completely visible.

There are, however, rare exceptions. Sometimes what I like to define as a moment of grace occurs: a suspended time in which the work is born and almost entirely completed within a few hours. In these cases, the hand moves without hesitation, with a naturalness that seems to precede thought itself. The gesture becomes fluid, necessary, almost automatic, and every choice immediately finds its place. These are rare and unpredictable moments, which I continue to welcome with wonder and amazement.

The duration of a work is therefore very variable, but on average it develops over several days, sometimes weeks. Yet it is not the material time of execution that determines its completion, but the time necessary for the image to find its own balance.

Understanding when a work is finished is perhaps the most difficult aspect. In works built through colour and emotional layering, the eye continues to identify new possibilities for intervention each time it observes them. For this reason, I never consider a work finished in an absolute sense.

However, there comes a moment when it stops asking for something. The tensions recompose themselves, the dialogue becomes quiet, and I feel that the work has reached its destination.

Who are your favourite artists? Who do you feel inspired by?

I have never had a single artist of reference. My influences are multiple and often belong to languages that are very different from one another.

I love the chromatic sensitivity and intimacy of Édouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard, the luminous vibration of the Pointillists, the expressive intensity of Egon Schiele, and the dynamism of Umberto Boccioni. I am also fascinated by the essentiality of Japanese art, the symbolic strength of tribal art, the gestural freedom of Abstract Expressionism, and the contemplative silence of Giorgio Morandi.

More than to a specific movement, I feel close to artists who are able to transform perception, colour, and matter into an emotional experience.

My inspiration comes as much from art as from the observation of nature, from lived time, and from those inner images that surface during the creative process.

THE ARTIST

Name: Claudia Aschieri
Residence: Italy

FEATURED WORKS