About Francesca Borgo

I hope art will keep giving you emotions and joy. I’m a self-taught Italian painter, and used to draw and paint since I was a kid and I’m pretty sure I’ll never stop painting 🙂 Art gives me the chance to shape life around my own values, my personal way to feel and act free. I love to paint abstract landscapes, and daily outdoor walks are my main source of inspiration: I find balance and freedom in retracing my steps, enjoying the lights, diving into the smallest details of the scene. Also, when I touch the bark of old trees I feel connected to earth and my perception of time expands, allowing calm feelings and a sense of perspective. I love to represent that peacefulness as cloudy areas merging into one another, where lights and colors mix and blend in a continuous movement, beyond what is real or realistic. It’s an effect of ‘non-definition’ that tries to go beyond the painting and symbolizes my wish to fully be myself, open to other people, part of the natural world. In many of my paintings I love to enrich the representation adding textural effects, using acrylic colours, gesso, acrylic resins mixed to sand. I like to use both dense and diluted colours – preferably earthy natural tones – to shape nuanced and subtle effects, while with metallic pigments I create light reflections. This technique allows me to bring depth and tension to the painting, generating contrasts – smooth and grainy, fine and coarse, matte and shiny, light and shadow – that I try to combine into a global feeling of gracefulness and balance. The coexistence of additional sensory aspects is my way to invite the viewer to embrace not only the visual, but also tactile and temporal dimensions into their experience, to ‘play’ with the painting and, perhaps, to imagine what is not even there. I also love to work with digital painting techniques, using a pen, touch-tablet and computer software for image creation and manipulation, that I eventually print (mostly) as unique copies. This technique allows me to represent the subtle struggle of our inner world from a different angle and to experiment new compositions, chromatic ensembles and multifaceted light effects. I am so grateful when people wish to share their thoughts and emotions, entering in a dialogue with the painting, perhaps willing to touch its surface or imagining himself or herself into it. It’s a precious chance for mutual exchange where everyone is safe and free to experience and express. I deem my works are mainly influenced by modern and contemporary artists. In particular I’m drawn by abstract expressionists such as M. Rothko, J. Pollock; neo-expressionists like A. Kiefer; abstract artists such as Zao Wou-Ki. I love the works of masters such as J.M.W. Turner and C. Monet.

Education:

- High school education in Humanities
- Master degree in Psychology (University of Padua, Italy)
- PhD in Cognitive Neurosciences (International School of Advanced Studies, Trieste, Italy)
- Master in Sport Psychology (PsicoSport, Milan, Italy)