Marco Orlandi
His creative story begins with an experience of deafness. At the age of 18 years after an accident and ‘was completely deaf for 3 months without being able to hear anything.
From that experience was born the Creative Feeling, an expressive drive, creative power that will affect him throughout his life.
Such a deep and intense experience made something wonderful germinate. I bring you back our telephone interview while waiting to visit him next summer, the person I am talking about is MARCO ORLANDI.
Can you tell me a little bit about yourself?
After that very intense period, I studied the process and understood how creativity and expressiveness are extremely linked and connected to language.
I am involved in teaching the creative disciplines precisely because of this experience that allows me to teach anyone how to draw and express themselves creatively.
My creative expression is realized in many other areas including poetry, I have written 2 books of poems and also won literary prizes, crafts dealing with furniture and light sculptures, and the museum I recovered from an 1800s paper mill in which I produce paper by hand.
The mill has become an arts and crafts training center in which we try to divulge the immense artistic heritage of Italian craftsmanship related to paper and its entire production cycle, from printing to movable type and bookbinding.
What are the preliminary steps to a creative project?
The creative process stems from an inner need. In human beings, there is a powerful energy source that asks to be manifested.
For those who have creative abilities, this process takes the form of the need to express themselves, and for me personally, to do so with sign and color.
Many beginners believe that it’s enough to stand in front of a blank sheet of paper and find in it the things to express. In reality, on the canvas we find nothing but what we have imagined, and only when this is extremely defined can we begin to work, but everything must be perfectly clear in the mind.
Many works of beginners and amateurs remain in the symbolic phase precisely for this reason because they draw on the symbol and graphic meaning that pre-exists in everyone.
How many attempts are needed to arrive at the idea that springs from the mind?
In my particular case, the work is completely done on a mental level, I cannot tackle a painting if I don’t have all the phases of the process clear inside of me, up to the final result, as if I were painting in my mind.
Since I don’t have much time at my disposal, I try to carry out all the preparatory activities with my creative imagination, which is a process that can be learned.
If we think of great artists the same sketches or drafts are works of art. What do you think about that?
We all have the idea that works of art are those beautiful complete drawings, that the pictorial work is beautiful and accomplished only when it is fully realized. That is, we believe that the things there in the painting are the actual transposition of the things that are here in the real world. This is not true at all.
I am terrified of some of my colleagues who must necessarily finish the work by completing it down to the last inch of the sheet or canvas. Some times I would buy them while they are working so much they are beautiful in their unfinished stage.
There really are masterpieces and yet their authors are so obsessed with the finished work that they let them die inside that thick blanket of useless mark and color.
Many of my works have this characteristic, that is, they have a completely evanescent part that leaves the viewer with a level of participation in my work, and then the task of the work of art is to allow the viewer to enter into it and put something of his own into it.
There is a lot of talk about Digital Craftsmanship, what is your opinion about it?
We have to distinguish one thing is the substance of creativity, that is, the idea behind creation, and one thing is the tools we use to get to that realization.
Digital tools are tools, but for many who do not have access to the substance of the issues, the digital tool becomes the idea itself. Many are convinced that just knowing how to use some photoshop textures or a 3D graphics program is enough to be able to invent something.
I still say that they are two separate things, one needs the other. I use it constantly, above all in the realization of luminous objects, but I believe that a fundamental distinction must be made between the object of creativity and the technique used to create it.
