How and why did you start your artistic career?

My approach to painting and to the study of artistic practices became evident from a young age. It was simply my way of reflecting on the world and on my childhood imaginaries.

I was fascinated by the spontaneity and immediacy of a representative graphic language: one that could be true, dynamic and fast, and that could be enriched by different tools and materials.

It has always been my way of finding my own time and space. Painting is a boundless possibility, but also something very clear and, in some way, ancient and simple. In its complexity, it is made of poor materials such as wood, cotton or linen, and pigments. It is a magical and mysterious practice, yet so clearly necessary to my idea of life.

I still consider my artistic career to be very young, and still entirely to be strengthened and consolidated, since many forms of awareness develop with a great deal of time, constancy, study, and daily practice.

How and why did you choose your expressive medium?

Painting, like drawing, has always been my most natural and immediate expressive language—the one that made me feel capable of doing something from a very young age.

All in all, I do not know exactly why I paint. Perhaps the right answer is that I have always done it. I do it because I have probably understood what I do NOT want to do.

Can you tell us about your creative process? How does one of your works come to life?

My creative process has gone through various phases.

Obviously, it began from an in-depth moment of graphic, technical, formal and compositional study, both during my early studies and my academic ones. Today, however, it has a freer mode, also predisposed to a solution of apparent chance.

Perhaps I first determine the dimensions of certain compositional volumes and the perspective directions of the scene, but then I remain “listening” to tensions and directions that the work itself indicates and makes me intuit at specific moments in the realization of the work.

A work is born by following a memory, never a precise graphic plan. In my case, it is born from the memory of a place, or of several places, from moments condensed into a single scene, or from periods in which I lived in and saw certain places.

How long does it take you? When do you consider it finished?

Personally, I do not have an ideal time for the realization of a work. I believe this is determined by many factors.

On average, however, I think I never take more than three working days to have an almost definitive global vision of it. Then, certainly, second thoughts, retouches or adjustments may happen even after a few days, but I do not have a fixed rule.

When can a work be said to be finished? I do not know. Some are clearly concluded, and I have immediate certainty of this, while with others it sometimes happens that I insist on retouching them minimally until I intuit an end, or desire one.

In general, I believe that some works are not destined to be called unfinished, but rather children of a state of passage, of repositioning, or of necessary experimentation.

Who are your favourite artists? Which ones do you draw inspiration from?

Personally, I believe I have never been particularly attentive to, or inspired by, one or a few artists in particular. On the contrary, I believe that my slight tendency not to be influenced has allowed me to better discover my own spontaneous and personal way of approaching painting.

That said, my relationship with the Venetian Masters and others, up to the historical avant-gardes such as Romanticism, Impressionism and Expressionism, has been and still is a visual cornerstone.

Certainly, with great interest, I look at and study all vedutista and landscape painting, English and Dutch, both ancient and contemporary.

THE ARTIST

Name: Davide Pegoraro
Residence: Italy

FEATURED WORKS