Luana Baldi

What drives you to create?

I love kneading material with my hands, recreating worlds I’ve seen and lived — yet which have never been truly real.

What inspires you?

My aim is to bring out into the light the colours within me, the ones I hide behind a dark, sombre surface.

How do you bring your works to life?

I literally work the materials with my hands — plaster, filler, PVA glue — and then apply them to the canvas, never uniformly but deliberately imperfectly. Sometimes I shape forms; at other times I let the material itself inspire the final outcome. I work with canvases laid horizontally, use very large brushes, acrylics, tar, and often finish with epoxy resin, which brings out the colours and reminds me of Della Robbia’s glazed ceramics.