Artist
About Federico Cortese
I was born in 1971 in Turin, Italy, where I live and work as an artist. Since I can remember, I have always drawn. My preferred techniques are classic oil-on-canvas paintings and pencil drawings.
I’m like a mouse in its box. A little mouse safe in its shelter that passes its time gnawing the food stored for the winter. But my food is the drawings. I work within my home. My studio is a room in the house in which I live. In this relatively small space, I have accumulated all the materials and equipment I need to draw and paint, and, in a certain sense, the suggestions that inspire my work. Here are the desks and drawing boards, with brushes and paint colours, but also, on the walls or placed in cupboards, paintings and drawings (I think each finished work is always an inspiration for the next, somehow). Great sources of ideas are books, music and, of course, the PC. The graphics programmes and virtual modelling programmes have become valuable sources of support over the years. Still, the richest mine is the internet: a reservoir of images and ideas from which to draw, and in which we often are lost (in addition to photos of my travels, all stored on the computer). It’s a small microcosm closed in on itself, somewhat impervious to the outside world (despite a large window with a beautiful view of Turin, I almost always work with the curtains closed). It is a bit as if the real world's suggestions were allowed to enter here only after being filtered and digested, after they have already been turned into experience. Exactly like a rat, quietly eating its supplies in its den, waiting for the end of winter.
