Artist #5: Silvia Pelissero

Silvia Pelissero is a really, really talented water color artist from Italy. She categorizes her work as surrealism, a type of art which, according to Wikipedia, “[features] the element of surprise, unexpected juxtapositions and non sequitur.” Many of Pelissero’s paintings really do include surprising, unreal elements that layer over what otherwise would be considered a very normal, realistic painting. About 90% of her paintings feature half-drawn face sketches in ink and embellished with swirls of color in purple, violet, and blue hues. She frequently uses smudges of light, faded water color to add shadowing to the faces so that we can really identify a realistic face behind all the unreal elements. All of the faces she draws are incredibly real-looking, with brilliantly drawn eyes and defined facial features. Watercolor is a very difficult medium to handle because of its tendency to be runny and blurred. If an artist is impatient and doesn’t wait for separate colors to dry, they can bleed into each other and often ruin the whole painting. Rather than being hindered by this, though, Pelissero controls this sort of dripping quality in her paintings to produce very intriguing works. She purposely allows her watercolors to drip and leak out from their borders to further intensify this surrealistic effect. All of her works are very colorful and eye-catching with this technique. She also sometimes adds butterflies or out-of-the-ordinary wisps of smoke and other interesting brush strokes that make each painting visually captivating. (Pelissero also has some ink-based and acrylic work, but her watercolor pieces are my favorite.) In her artist statement, Pelissero commented that she donated some of her paintings to a 1000Drawings charity event to raise money to support FairPen, a group which helps children in Uganda publish handwritten newspapers. These pieces were sold for 10₤! She is very well known in Italy, and often works under the pseudonym “agnes-cecile.”