Stefano Pallara

The eco-friendly artwork of Stefano Pallara #ArtistOfTheWeek

Agathe Guibé

Stefano is originally from the South of Italy but has been living in London for decades now.

His work revolves around themes such as the definition of identity, introspection and freedom, merged into landscapes like the Mediterranean Sea and its dazzling light.

If you want to know more about his story, I Invite you to read our previous article.

When preparing this article, we asked Stefano:

"Is there any masterpiece you completed that has a special meaning for you?".

His answer was yes: Small Town Boy Plotting

The story of this painting is directly linked to Stefano's life and his moments of loneliness where he could fantasize about his future.

Can you tell us more about the story beyond this painting?

"Small Town Boy Plotting is a painting about my past, my youth. It's about escapism and a larger than life juvenile desire for discovery, an impulse that haunted me in the years of my life before I moved abroad. It's also about a melancholic sense of isolation and solitude often experienced when living in a small town.

The boy in the painting contemplates the horizon and daydreams about a different life in a distant place.

I was born and raised in a small town in southern Italy and was eager to discover the world. When I turned 21, I won a scholarship that gave me the opportunity to study in London. From that moment on, my life changed radically and forever.

The car in the picture is a Ford Escort, my first car. When I got my driving license, I used to like driving to remote places, towards the countryside or the seaside, and to then stop to contemplate the horizon and fantasize about my future."

What we think in Artupia:

"I love how Stefano’s paintings seem to be abstract at first glance, and it’s only when you take the time to give it a deeper look that you notice the figurative elements in the composition.

Light, sky, and water seem to merge in a mesmerizing explosion of colors and textures giving a surreal depth to the painting.

You can recognize Stefano’s style just by looking at a painting, like Mater Suspiriorum, where digital encounters traditional techniques creating a singular signature look and feel.

Small Town Boy Plotting gives room for many interpretations: is this boy alone in the endless desert facing a burning sky at sunset? Is he on the beach looking at the ocean on fire? Both might be true, maybe it is something else.

We will never know for sure what is this boy plotting around and this makes the painting even more interesting: it is a canvas, an open window for your mind to let your imagination flow.

This is what interests me the most in Art, not just to receive a message, but also being able to reflect and make it my own."

Thomas, designer at Artupia

Stefano & Artupia

Stefano created his Artist profile on Artupia in 2017 and immediately started to upload his beautiful colored paintings representing landscapes and imaginative rooms floating in space.

He told us about his life in East London, in this huge building: he talked about the ground floor where there was a large rubbish room and people throwing everything away.

Every day he was annoyed to see the progressive pollution and waste of potentially reusable material. So he thought he'd get some of this material back. He started with the furniture (wardrobes, chairs, tables, mirrors, bookcases...). He brought them home, cleaned, repaired, painted and reused to furnish his apartment and his friends' apartments. Then he started to find panels, frames, canvases, and a lot of paint for the walls... that's how he started to introduce recycled materials in his paintings.

His first collection Colordive was inspired by his desire to protect the environment through the creative use of waste and potentially polluting materials.

Stefano was selected by Artupia to realize one of the Custom painting used to launch the Disney film "Mary Poppins The return". His painting was also selected for the #TakeMeHome campaign and prints were distributed in four Italian cities; Milano, Venice, Pisa, Rome.

In January 2018 Lucky Red asked Artupia to create some Custom paintings for the launch of the new Van Gogh film "At Eternity's Gate". Lucky Red selected Stefano to create a work inspired by the scene of the film in which Van Gogh is walking through a wonderful field of lavender. Pallara's work was exhibited in the Giulio Cesare cinema in Rome.

In June 2019 Stefano participated to our event #MakeArtNotPollution completing three Original paintings of cityscapes with colorful lyrical skies: the pieces of Art were made using recycled materials found in skips and bin stores; reused wooden panels and canvas, discarded wall paint leftovers, glitter recycled and paper cut-outs.

At the moment Stefano actively collaborates with Artupia uploading regularly his new pieces and creating customized works for companies and individuals.

SEPTEMBER 2019 INTERVIEW

Paintings with recycled waste material, discover Stefano Pallara #ArtistOfTheWeek

by Agathe Guibé

"I adore simple pleasures. They are the last refuge of the complex."  Oscar Wilde

This quote defines in some way Stefano's personality and the reason he started painting years ago.

Colourful but nostalgic, Stefano's paintings are his shelter, his "freedom and catharsis".

Stefano is originally from the South of Italy but has been living in London for decades now.

His work revolves around themes such as the definition of identity, introspection and freedom, merged into landscapes like the Mediterranean Sea and its dazzling light. 

Can you tell us a bit more about yourself and how you started painting?

"My name is Stefano and I'm Italian. I grew up in a very traditional family where out-of-the-ordinary behaviour was not allowed. I received a strict upbringing, expressing my creativity wasn't really encouraged, and I was only allowed to play with typical children's games.   

I wasn't interested in cliché boys' games like football, fighting and plastic guns, because of the sense of violence and competitive nature I perceived in them. Drawing was my way out, a creative space where I could play with whatever I wanted, freeing myself from the constant repression imposed by the world around me.

In real life, I was isolated but in my sketchbook, I was never alone. I started drawing animals, flowers, plants, cities and landscapes, queens, witches, wizards, angels... and it never really stopped. Painting became a part of my life,  and now  as an adult, I find in the creative act the same sense of freedom and catharsis that I discovered as a child."

"Drawing was my way out, freeing myself from the constant repression imposed by the world around me"

"My childhood was dark and it left a black hole inside me. Painting is a language I use to have a dialogue with the loneliness I experienced in those years and to accept it. In the past, I tried to fill that hole in various ways but with no success. Painting allows me to leave that hole as it is but to build a new world all around it.

Loneliness is a recurring theme in my paintings but being an "outsider" also generates an exhilarating sense of freedom: the lightness of not having to conform to anything, the liberating detachment of deviating from the norm."

Was there any event that influenced your artistic path?

"The technological progress of recent years with digital photography and the increasingly sophisticated software for image manipulation, have definitely had an impact on the type of technique I developed: a mixed-media of acrylic, oil, and collage of digital images.

I travel a lot around the world and like everyone else, I take many photographs. I find it extraordinary that modern technology allows me to incorporate fragments of my life into my work, share the magic of faraway places that I was lucky to visit and infuse the picture with a new life.

My artistic evolution has also been influenced by my growing interest in environmental protection. My last three collections (‘Colordive’, ‘Inner Horizons’, and ‘Wondering Heights’) were mostly produced using recycled waste material: wall-paint leftovers, thrown away furniture, wooden panels, frames from broken mirrors... Many of the paintings produced with entirely recycled material were purchased very quickly; I like to think that this is due to a mysterious and positive "ecological karma".

"Finally, my daily practice of meditation, as well as my love for literature and poetry, are sources of immense inspiration. Many of the images in my paintings appear in my mind as I meditate. Meditation allows me to reflect inwards, taking a step back to observe my mind and moods from a broader perspective. It helps me to understand the dynamics of what happens to me and how it affects my emotional sphere, transforming its essence into images. The human mind produces 70,000 thoughts a day, most of these thoughts are "waste" and don't correspond to the truth, they confuse and intoxicate our perceptions. When I meditate, I purify my mind and find the calm, the discipline and the concentration I need to conceive and execute a painting."

What does Art mean to you?

"For me, Art is inventing a completely free and intimately personal language to express ideas, life experiences, and moods closely related to the existential and emotional journey of the artist. My style was influenced by my travels, by broader horizons of interaction with other cultures and other languages.

The work that I started in 2017 reflects themes and contents of my life experiences. From a technical point of view, it took me 43 years to find my style, years and years of experimentation, frustration, and failure in search of an artistic language that could represent my inner world.

Having found it is one of the most beautiful things that has happened to me and I am very proud of it. I desire to continue over the years to find in the execution of each painting the same pleasure and fun as ever."