Carmelo Blandino was born to Sicilian parents in Tübingen, Germany, and grew up in the culturally charged city of Montreal, Quebec. He studied art and design at the local colleges and began a successful career as a freelance illustrator, working with architects, designers, and advertising agencies. In 2002 Blandino shifted his focus and indulged in the world of fine art. Today, his paintings are widely known for their immediacy and lascivious expressions of colour, movement, and shape. His work is exhibited in New York, Palm Beach, Naples, Stockholm, Calgary, Vancouver, Toronto and his beloved Montreal. He has conducted summer workshops at Von Liebig Art Center of Naples, Florida, and taught drawing for many years at Dawson College in Montreal before transplanting himself to Naples, Florida where he lives today.
Blandino’s love for painting as a means of expression has led him to work in encaustic. “There is a sense of romance and history associated to encaustic paint that inspires me. Just like the ancient Romans and Egyptians who brought special care and attention to this medium, I feel a need to continue in that tradition”. Choosing to work on larger surfaces, and in a more contemporary style, the result is work that is introspective and moody, offering challenging suggestions to the viewer.His works are about the joy that is inherent in us and the journey we take from darkness towards the light we strive to claim as our own. His subject matter over the last few years has revolved around flowers, landscapes, and figurative.
Since 2005, Blandino has experimented extensively with the free flowing visual energy inherent to the pleasing form of the flower. Sharper, shapelier, and more fragrant than any of his past efforts, Blandino’s new work extends closer towards aesthetic bliss, an infusion of classical refinement, technique and subject, imbued with a distinctly contemporary flavour and scope. The broad feathered gestures of Blandino’s paintings are worked, re-worked, confidently applied - in a style that can only be described as Urban Boroque - with materials gathered during walks, stencils, spray paint, and oils. Blandino’s elaborate images evolve out of wide-ranging meditations on the interrelations between nature, beauty, and the origins of humanity. This new exhibition displays the range and variety of the artist’s palette; vibrant colours, charged movement, and the recognition of beauty as the most significant marker in the evolution of human consciousness. Carmelo Blandino’s flowers are up with joy, laughter, and drunkenness of spirit, cheerfully reflecting the ragged meadow of the soul.
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD (PDF)