Daniela Nicola

I paint since I could keep any ‘marking’ utensil in my hand. But until recently I kind of ignored rules and labellings and most of all I didn’t try to dissect my work or anyone’s work in some heroic pursuit to find from where the magic comes.

Until I was struck by this widespread label, ‘raw and poetic’. Most art critics, I guess, find it handy and powerful enough to stick it to anything and anybody, most notorious being of course Picasso and Matisse.

I wasn’t sure what to do with this concept, so large it covers almost everything to the point of obstructing any other dimension. Even more awe stricken I was when told I should try find my inner raw and poetic vein. Like it was some sort of quest, an artistic goal, something that one could achieve as a result of will power and painting experimentation..

The example of children’s rawness in painting is widespread and an obvious one (or animals-I cannot help underlining the irony of a human ‘giving’ brushes and paints as tools and means for monkeys or elephants to ‘express’ themselves for a tasty reward).

I think it is just a big confusion and a pushed romanticism in a modernist disguise to try to resuscitate and make live that time of happy clumsiness mixed with buckets of enthusiasm. Not to mention nobody seems to remember or care about the different degrees of frustration as a child’s imagination, sensitivity and perception of reality evolve much quicker that the skillfulness of hands. Some degree of skill and control is there but it is the sincerity of expression that reaches us. There is no obvious message. There is only the joy of making stuff. Everything else is just interpretation.

Whereas adults using this ‘naive’ manner of painting will paint this way, in most of cases, because that freedom, that joie de vivre, that simplicity of expression feels right, not because more sophisticated means were unknown. On the other hand there is nothing childish or naive in the crude work of mentally ill adults. Maybe there are simplified lines, prime colours, unsteady brush strokes but there is nothing childish or naive in that crude emotion. Everything develops quite complex and there is always a message..

There are moments of intense synergy between emotion and the act of painting and an artist needs to be prepared to act on them. Hand becomes an extension of sensitivity maybe becoming one with the sensitivity.

It takes time to make the hands obey, catch the slightest sign of emotion, to transmit the synesthesy within.  

There is nothing raw and poetic in a clumsy hand and an undecided mind.

My ‘rawness’ is a personal experience or state of mind that cannot be reached willfully.

It comes as naturally as old age.

It is daunting to start a new ‘thing’, be it a white page, a white canvas, a new chair. And the most daunting is a deadline. Even the word ‘dead’ and ‘line’ has that ultimative sems and somehow it gives me that feel of an ever present Damocles sword over my head. 

But instantly I remeber Duffy Duck’s adventure with the golden eggs mafia, you know, Mafia guys wanting him to lay the golden egg, and him demanding ultimate luxury conditions in order to ‘produce’ the so wanted egg. In the end the gun stuck against his head does the job,and Duffy Duck lays the precious golden egg. Hence ‘you never know what you can do until you have a gun pointing at you’.

So somehow pressure seems to be the ultimate trigger for ‘golden’ creation. Do we all have this capacity to produce what it is required or is just a one off thing. I know it can be about me opening to the universe and universe responding back to me with the infinite knowledge so it will make everything easy and peachy but the reality is as human it is very hard to push away all the emotions, the daily chores, the face that looks back at you from some merciless mirror. And laziness is as necessary as the pressure. Striking the right ballance seems to be the tricky bit.  

Today I just had the urge to destroy every single bit of drawing or painting or doodling that might be the basis of some object in the future.

With a classical education in Letters and Philology and seemingly un-related Product Design degree, I consider myself an artist even if we live in a society where specialisation is narrow and high, and mass-production is promoted for its social and high profit values.

As a Product Design student a poetic or artistic vision of a product was perceived to be of a lesser value by the engineer minded. I could understand this point of view but I couldn’t agree with it.

After immersing in apparently absent minded doodling and smudging, a loose structure emerges. The process might seem spontaneous or careless.

However there are aspects and choices aware or sub –conscientious to be made all this time. I feel there is a curve going back to childhood when doodling wasn’t about the knowledge but about freedom. After mastering tools and mediums to express out, the inner child wants to go back to that fearless state.  The knowledge is left at an unaware level and the freedom of gesture is confident, manifesting as driving energy. Imagination is not constraint by required data.  After all, is easier to find a way to materialize that fleeting dream than to add a ‘poetic’ element to a design. Adding value through embellishment it is an over-used practice starting to be resented by the contemporary buyer. So why not just go back to dreamt products. To something with soul.

Exploring design from a humanist perspective is not so far-fetched even if the ‘humanist’ is seen as lacking the mathematical, scientific skills and ‘practicality’ that come as a must for a ‘realist’. But more and more poetry, sensitivity and story-telling attached to a product makes it desirable, to be kept and cherished and more than anything, used.

Literature and Philosophy, Design, Architecture and by extent any creative area have loosely speaking realizing products. All good ones have a common significant, an evolving and more and more definite shape that reveals itself.  As if ready to be born. 

Interrelating areas of knowledge cohabitating and occasionally clashing make the creativity applicable in tangent spaces: 3d of interior design or product reflecting philosophy, paintings reflecting structural awareness, writing evocating levels and time frames and why not the occasional chaos.