Biography
Chiara Di Donato was born in Naples on June 26th, 1980. In love with art and fascinated by colours, she draws passionately showing great creative skills at an early age.
At the kindergarten she made a huge number of drawings by using pastels, pencils, tempera and watercolours that she used to offer to her young “clients”.
Her artistic background stems from school education and is fed by her family who lovingly led her to develop a passion for art in all its forms, thanks to endless “walks” through museums, expositions and art galleries.
Formation
Although she was brought up to the fine arts, during her adolescence she followed a study pathway far from art. After earning her high school diploma in 1999, she obtained the “teaching qualification” and in 2008 graduated in Educational Science. These studies led her teaching in kindergarten around Italy.
She has never abandoned painting. She devotes her free time, indeed, to visual arts being very interested in real life drawing, chiaro scuro technique with chalk and oil landscape painting. Then, she tries some new techniques and shapes being inspired only the colours and energy they instil with. Thus, begins her approach to abstract art.
At the same time she studies in depth great artists such as Michelangelo Leonardo, Caravaggio and then she falls madly in love with French impressionists. Thereafter she focuses her attention on the production of Monet, Cezanne, Gauguin and Renoir, passing through Van Gogh’s expressionism.
From 2001 to 2016, she goes through a period of artistic stillness due to an intensive period of training and work in the school context. This period will end only later when, once she regained possession of her art as a safety valve, she will be struck by the spatula technique and by any other instrument that makes her artworks a mixed media art. This intimately abstract transformation finds in Chiara the best means to realize and “rebuild” herself by studying movement and matter. The new phase is influenced by the artistic development of modern painters such as Pollock and Richter.
In constant evolution, she makes many trips abroad searching for new human experiences and inspirations able to enrich her works.
She loves experimenting and testing, in fact she has often changed her style, sometimes going back to using and merging brush and spatula, mixed techniques and new colours, refining a research that is an essential element of her expressive evolution
With her lively, sunny and cheerful character, she currently lives in her beloved Naples, where she is divided between her teaching work and the study of new techniques characterized by a fruitful pictorial vein in a constant metamorphosis.
What the artist expresses
By using spatulas, overlapping multi-layered colours and by a meticulous work of painting manipulation, the artist let the lower levels resurfacing by means of chromatic contrasts in the upper layers of paint. Once the “hierarchy” of colours has been decided and the spatula joins the game, the artist accepts the random component of the process as a fundamental step for the final result. This allows her to obtain unpredictable and unique paintings.
The artist abolishes the use of the easel by adopting a powerful working method. Hence, she uses an horizontal work surface that resists the work carried out with the spatulas.
So, being able to turn around the canvas, looking and working it from any corner, she feels as a part of what she is creating, being completely immerged “inside the painting”.
With this technique the different layers of paint can take on particular richness and depth.
An ever-changing emotion emerges.
Colour is the essential part of psyche and it transmits many sensations. By using the spatula, the artist lets colours interact with each other thus creating shades, veins, marks, lights and shadows with a special movement and depth. So, they become the fundamental means to catch the observer into a rush of feelings.
Each painting does not set into a sole expressive scheme but represents the absolute freedom of energy. It is both research and experimentation of colours harmony.
Harmony is an age-old issue, above all the emotional one. Every individual seeks and craves it. According to the Chinese thought, everything is shared between yin (black) and yang (white), a sequence of lights and shadows. The harmony can be described as a fluid and mysterious blend of these two elements.