EVELYN ASTEGNO - PORTRAITURE CLASSES

I would like to introduce myself and my artwork

through some extracts of an article by Giovanna

Grossato, an Italian art critic of my hometown.

article on “Il Giornale di Vicenza” , Sunday 4 July 2004

It does exist deep inside many of us another Ego, of

eternal youth and purity; it represents all we could

and always wished to be. This Ego we miss and

contemplate with tormenting desire is the poetic core

of a young artist from Vicenza who is now becoming

successfull in the United States.

Evelyn's paintings are extremely representative of

her style, soon well defined from the beginning and

matured since she started her career. They belong to

a disquieting Surrealism where characters, probable

but not assimilable to any type completely rooted in reality, represent probably different aspects of the same subject: the artist herself. Her painting is a thought translated into image, starting with the conviction that language normally used in “figurative painting” to describe reality, at the end of the representative course, gives it just one of the thousands of possibilities of interpretations. So the sensation in front of these paintings is that they develop a spin around the Ego using a language that draws on a sort of “Magic Realism”, a term used by Franz Roth and Massimo Bontempelli to identify the tendency in the European painting of the 20’ies to give Reality a photographic representation, immersed nevertheless in an atmosphere silent and detached that puts in a painting an element of unreality and a sense of gap of time.

The narrative process of Evelyn Astegno also utilizes the ambiguity of the frontiers between Truth and Dream; it adds the disquieting doubt that there won’t be any awakening to mark the harsh certainty of reality neither a reversible way to the total immersion into the Ego.

Astegno has a Master Degree from the University of Venice in Architecture. She also has had private lessons from Giorgio Scarato, great Italian illustrator, from May 2002 to March 2003. She attended classes on engraving and etching from October 2003 to December 2003 in Lonigo, Vicenza. She is known in Vicenza, Italy for her beautiful works.

In St Louis, Missouri, she is currently a resident artist of the Third Floor Gallery on Washington and is known for her paintings belonging to a sort of “Magic Realism”. She has been participating also at many drawing sessions of the “Draw Club”; she is currently a member of “Art Dimensions”and “Women’s Caucus for Art”.

More Info on Evelyn and her work