Il Calabrone: a pictorial digital work by Alessandra Bisi

Artists make the stories we want to tell visible, holding the power of story-telling that builds culture capacity and brand identity.  Pollination inspires Instagram moments.

While I was reflecting on coffee and nature, my mind traveled to the coffee plantations, the buzz of the pickers, the sound of life. I started to work with shapes, colors, and their relationships, to create a composition that tells a story of pollination.

I am interested in color and the theories that make color the protagonist of visual perception, and even more of nature. I like to go to the "Officina del Colore" in Milan where I find natural colors. The walls are covered with shelves and glass vials filled with powders, liquids, and mixtures, often rare, and with shades and variations of pigments that could satisfy a 16th-century artist. Among these jars, I choose my ingredients. The greens in the background of the hornet are the almost intact descendants of chromium oxide, malachite, verdigris. Browns are earth of yellow, ocher, and shade. I usually bond my colors with linseed or safflower oil, gum, and resin, however, this is a water painting. 

For this piece, I painted the background of coffee flowers and leaves on a textured, handmade paper, using natural pigments and brush strokes. I prepared my colors with interest and fun, in vaguely ritual practice to express a vision and sensation perceived from nature.

My profoundly Italian and traditional art training inspires me to include new pictorial resources and expand my expressive vocabulary. I am fascinated by the possibilities of digital that is not a substitute for painting. It is a different language with new properties. It may not achieve the emotional results of physical glazes, of hand-mixed color shades, or of textures and stratifications. These manual processes cannot be codified by programs because they are humanly unrepeatable, random, and the result of happy, unpredictable inaccuracies. Digital art however offers its own equally noble language filled with new opportunities and variations. I hence use digital art to explore technical attributes that I cannot release with manual painting

For this piece, I let the background dry, and then I acted digitally to insert the main subject : the hornet, our pollinator hero, that is more real than real, more explicit, and perhaps more striking: it is the hyper-realistic digital act of this artistic storytelling. 

This art celebrates nature visually, combining classical and contemporary pictorial beauty.