Michele Del Campo Paintings: Gorgeous Brushworks of An Italian Artist

Michele Del Campo

Michele Del Campo is an Italian artist who lives and works in London. He studied Fine Arts partly in Milan and partly in Madrid. Michele also studied Illustration In Dundee (UK). He has had various solo exhibitions in London, Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, Milan and Lima. It was a great pleasure for us to take an interview with Michele Del Campo and we wish you a pleasant reading and viewing of Michele Del Campo paintings.

AP: Michele, thank you very much for finding the time to give us an interview. It’s a great honor for us to see you here. We’ve prepared some interview questions for you and we hope you will like them. Could you please tell me what got you started?

Michele: I grew up in the countryside by the South Eastern Italian coast (Sannicandro Garganico). I couldn’t meet up many of my friends up in town, so I used to spend time exploring, cycling, drawing or making sculptures with any materials that I found. My mum liked to do some oil paintings sometimes, but in reality it was an art teacher at high school that encouraged me to try oil painting when I was 14 during her class. She would even ask the following teachers of other subjects to let me continue painting during their class, she really loved what I did. However, I only started to take art seriously when I moved with my family to a big city, which was Milan. I started my formal university education in the arts at 21.

The Letter

AP: What a great start! Do you have any formal education in figurative art or were you self-taught?

Michele: With the way things work today in universities, one is much less luckily to find a good formal guide from tutors than by himself. I studied at three different universities, I have a degree in Illustration and one in Fine Arts, but it is from my intense practice in my studio where I discovered, and I continue discovering, the secrets of my craft.

AP: I agree with you that practice is the best way to improve your skills. What genre are your paintings?

Michele: I don’t know if I could categorize my paintings very easily, because I tend to continuously shift the focus of my interest, and that is visible throughout my various solo exhibitions (from interiors and still-life to urban scenes to urban portraits to a more allegorical realism).

The Coming Storm

AP: And how would you describe your works?

Michele: Painterly and fresh from a close view, more precise from a distance, concerned with beauty, light and mood.

AP: What kind of equipment and techniques do you use to paint your pictures?

Michele: I work around ideas in pen or pencil sketches on sketchbooks. Some of those ideas I develop later into oil paintings, and I often use photography as an intermediate passage between the sketch and the final painting.

Cars Cemetery

AP: Are there any artists that use use for references?

Michele: There are so many artists who inspire me, but none of them is a strong reference. To give a few names, I would say Joaquín Sorolla for the light, Andrew Wyeth for the poetry and Liu Xiaodong for the boldness of the brushwork.

AP: Do you have any dream project? What is it?

Michele: A big mural painting in a public place.

Mural (Dyptich)

AP: Wow, that’s great! We wish your dream to definitely come true! Do you have a formula for success in your activity? Do you participate in contests or exhibitions?

Michele: Visibility is very important and it can be achieved exhibiting in art galleries and in art fairs. However there is no big, sudden step to success, but a series of steady steps in the right direction, keeping in mind that the quality of work comes first.

AP: Michele, thank you for sharing your thoughts about success. I’m sure your readers will find them useful. Is there someone who supports you in your creativity?

Michele: Amparo, my wife, has always been very supportive, since I went to live with her and we struggled to survive because I still had no income from my paintings. Her open-mindedness and wide culture was a fertile ground to build-up an awareness of my means as an artist.

The Other Girl

AP: That is so great that your wife has been always supportive! Could you please tell us three lessons you believe are really important for every artist?

Learn to be humble and have doubts, doubts are very healthy and they prevent you from becoming stale.
Take a good break after a long period of hard work for an exhibition, to refresh your ideas. Reading, visiting exhibitions, travelling, developing creativity in other mediums are important activities to refresh your ideas and enrich you.
Look continuously around you, don’t close yourself behind walls or you will not have anything to say in your art.

Michele, thank you very much for giving us the interview. We would like to wish you steady success, brilliant ideas and of course continuous inspiration. To learn more about Michele Del Campo paintings feel free to visit his personal website.