Photography is a beautiful form of art. The breathtaking and graceful scenes captured by the Italian artist Silvia Colombo is proof of this. As an amateur photographer and stamp maker from Italy, Colombo frequently makes flowers and fauna from nature her main subjects. Her color scheme generally includes varying shades of leaf green, taupe, faint blue, lavender, and pink. Each photograph has a clear forefront — usually featurng a single spot of a tree or a flower petal — and a fuzzy backdrop of blurred, pastel-like colors to give a sort of perspective effect in which the viewer’s closeness to the flower or leaf or object is in focus. Each dewdrop on the flower’s petals are captured in sparkling clarity and rain comes across in trickling lines with Colombo’s skillful use of the polaroid camera.
While aesthetics and composition are fundamental for any painting or photograph, I also think that naming each work of art is also really important in terms of artistic expression and merit. The fact that Silvia Colombo comes up with really thoughtful and creative titles for her pieces is an added bonus to her already awe-inspiring collection. She is able to post serene and peaceful photographs of turtles half-submerged in local ponds, leaves swaying in the wind, and roses peaking out from snowfalls and come up with names like: Dye Water with the Colours of Life , Season’s Stranger, and Beauty and the Frost. She also has ridiculously cute pictures of her cat, Layla, sleeping in funny positions. For instance, one of my favorite of her pieces is a photograph of an extended kitty paw which she titled “Deal?”. Occasionally, she also takes photographs of random everyday objects like pages in a worn book or an empty glass bottle and turns them into interesting compositions. For instance, her photograph, My Lucky Stars, features a corked glass bottle containing tiny, folded origami stars in a wide array of colors in an open field of grass.
Colombo was a self-taught artist who enjoyed taking pictures when she was little. Today, she uses a Canon PowerShot SX1 to capture her photographs and Adobe Photoshop CS4 to refine the colors of many of her pieces. Besides photography, Colombo also enjoys stamp making. Due to stringent copyright issues, I can’t directly re-post her work, but if you’d like to take a look at her gallery, you can view it here on her official website.