Featured Artist: Venantius Pinto

I am constantly in a search for possibilities in phenomena that pass across, and within, my senses. Through drawing and printmaking, I attempt to achieve marks that are organic and reveal underlying emotions of my thoughts and ideas. I enter spaces through my drawings and in doing so bring out a nature that otherwise I would not be able to access. My works are reflections on experiences situated at the intersection of religion, sexuality, and social consciousness.

I used a variety of tools that span cultures and convictions–-each suited towards particular responses. In the piece "East of the Railway Tracks," they range from a wide assortmenst of inks—walnut, photocolors to shellac-based inks and sumi; watercolor, including enogu, and gouache. The brushes used were mostly Japanese, reed pen, mapping nibs, and my fingers. I am impartial to materials but use them to create a specific presence that I cannot achieve any other way.To this I add––coir brushes, cotton swabs, gauze, coit pens, large brushes used for ornamentation and plastering, silverpoint, etc. I need these tools to help me achieve specific narratives that rely on layering. Layering is a metaphor for encapsulating fragments and wholes that convey power, compassion, and the memory of time & culture. I use color as discrete units of energy in an attempt to portray an ineffable, archetypal numinosity.

The Moleskine Japanese Accordion serves me well in that it is a compact, miniature format— that structurally is itself a quiet narrative, if one may put it this way. It strongly appeals to me considering the possibilities that I am envisaging in creating a series of works that are autobiographical in experience and the continued act of responding to them in Moleskines. I also work on larger books with greater absorbency that are not within the range manufactured by Moleskine.

Venantius J. Pinto
View his works on FLICKR
................................................................

- Blank Page #012      
- Inspiration: Tony Hawk     
- Pentel Pocket Brush Pen

Today on Notebookism