The beginning

Mele started painting really "by chance".

His brother Giovanni attends kindergarden and he's afraid of doing mistakes while painting. Therefore I thought it could be helpful for him to experiment freely with colours, without proposing any stereotype. I bought ten liters of paint for children, few gigantic paper sheets, I masked up a whole room and I made him paint with only his slips on. He got really enthusiastic and at the end he was swimming in paint which had become, mixed all up, an ambiguous brown color. He gradually lost interest in paper and he started painting directly his body. His father named this "primitive painting", instead of "body painting", supposing that maybe a caveman could had done the same as our son. There was no artistic value whatsoever in what we realized, but it was really funny!

Paper sheets, soaked in paint, mashed all up and I threw everything away. I considered we could have tried again using a cheap canvas, which is more resistant if an enormous amount of paint is being used. I went to the shop and I bought two canvases. Although I was sure Emanuele could have never been able to paint anything, I thought it was fair, at least, to let him have a go at it...

Well...when he tried...wow! The result was his first painting called "Non praevalebunt". At a first glance it looked to me just a random mix of slaps and splashes, then I watched it better and I said to myself " No, this is good, it definitely is. It's really beautiful!" I waited for it to dry and I took it to the frame maker. The two men in the shop told me it was ages they hadn't seen a so good painting, but that I didn't sign my work. I answered them I was not the artist and that the person who painted it could not sign it. I told them my three years old son painted it, without saying how badly handicapped he was. They exclimed surprised: "But...He's a genius!". I simply enjoyed the comment. They gave Mele a new canvas as a present saying they wanted to see if his first painting was just a mere coincidence or this child could really paint so well. He used it to paint "Fire", his second work. Since then he has kept on realizing paintings of a moving vitality. 

Leggi in ITALIANO