GIUDITTA E OLOFERNE
I was very thrilled about my first oil painting, "which would have been the star of it?"; it was an important moment!
At that time, I was attending a very special art course, by chance I found it...or it found me :P
We were a small group of artists, people there were very talented and the majority of them were already specialized in sculpture, glass painting etc. but they wanted to improve some other techniques.
I felt like it was my world: everybody sharing one common passion by talking about the last exhibition we saw or just by working all together like in a small workshop from the Reinassance.
But let's go back to this painting!
under the advice of my super maestro, I decided to go for a famous painting by Caravaggio, "
Giuditta e Oloferne".
In the huge and integral version, the attention is focused on Oleferne's eyes, vitreus and full of pain; but what really captures the attention is the contrast between the two women faces on the right:
Giuditta is honourable, respectable and full of values,
she is fighting for her fellows against the foreign enemies and most of all, she is beautiful and young; the
old woman instead, is an old and ugly slave, depicted
there just to highlight the beauty of the other woman.
To be honest, it was very difficult to choose which of the three figures to recreate; I really wanted to work on a close up of the painting, concentrate on one face and in this way, I discovered my true passion for human body in its totality.
The shape of the nose, the deep wrinkles no harmonious at all, yet so interesting to the observer;
As a famous aphorism says in italian:
"Se pensi che qualcosa è brutto, stai guardando male. La bruttezza è solo un fallimento del vedere".
(Matt Haig)
"
If you think that something is ugly, you are looking at that wrongly. Uglyness is just a failure of the sight" (Matt Haig).
