Federico is a Stockholm-born artist, who grew up in Italy and now lives in Bali. He talks about art, love and life.
You were based in Bali for the last seven years. What is your background?
I was born in Stockholm in 1974. My family moved to Italy when I was 13 in 1987. I attended the International School of Art in Riccione, Italy. After art school, I really did well to be an artist painting has always been my passion. I entered the fashion industry in Milan and worked in high fashion with the house of Lorenzo Riva. I was working the shows in Paris, Rome and Ready to Wear Milan. It was a good education, but I realized it was not my thing!
My father lived in Singapore at the time, so I went there as a fashion designer and opened my own business. I set up shoots for Marie Claire and other top customers. I was beginning to come to Bali every month and I am inspired by the Balinese. It was a simpler time in Bali and I has been deeply influenced by the simplicity of life of the Balinese people and the dignity with which they are executed. There was not much materially, but lived wealthy lives. The people here were proud and happy with so little. I began to look at my life and look inside.
Inspired, I returned to Singapore and painted more than twenty pieces. Friends loved it, but I was still shy about my work. I was painting murals and finally asked me to show my work to open a restaurant. The Italian ambassador and many other dignitaries were present and I sold. Galleries approached me and soon I had a one-year contract with a gallery and my paintings went up in value.
The next! As an artist, I am always looking forward to the following table. When a work is completed, it is done and I go. But I must say that the Venice Biennale was a great honor.
The Dalai Lama recently expressed it belongs to artists and musicians to reveal the inner light and truth to people if consciousness can be changed. What is your response to that?
I agree that the arts can give people experiences that they otherwise would not have. I think the artist has a responsibility to be true to his creativity. A job can affect different people in different ways, but it makes them look themselves and their relationship with the world around them. The arts are so important in society and in the end it is their historical qualities that make them powerful. Albert Einstein said that imagination is more important than knowledge in general, because knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all that will have to know and understand. People have to do things for love and pure passion, not profit. If you are pure and honest, you are responsible. The most important part of my art is the process rather than the final product.
Everyone is an artist at birth?
Yes, but few make it through childhood with their creativity intact. He is educated and programmed on us in the first decade of our lives. But we have all this creative energy; a bit of "God" in us that we all have the potential to express creativity. In education, we are taught to use only six senses; to limit our experience and focus on money unsustainably, contrary to sustainable lifestyles, we can achieve by being more creative. We certainly have all the tools and technology to achieve this. It is one of the things that impressed me so much in the early years here in Bali. Everyone was involved in a kind of creativity; make their own deals every day and offering up the universe - everything was done by hand. In the West, we use art as therapy, because it is so lacking in our lives as exposure to it heals people of many diseases, both physical and psychological.
People - they are so complicated, with layers so much potential and so much. In my early work, I painted that my imagination. Now I also incorporate my photography to capture some images, such as a person, a face, an emotion. I am a filter of what I see. The reality is a central reference point from which I work to express feelings and human emotions in the world today.
How do you feel about all the changes that we see here
Bali is an example around the world - as the evolution, bad or good marches on. I do not complain or compare to the past. The world has changed exponentially and all modern ills we see clearly here exist everywhere. The plastic waste is in our face rather than sea trawling and creating an island larger than Australia - and that's just in the Pacific
We won a lot of good things! ; Technology and healthy food. I want to see Bali compromising its beautiful culture that embraces the beauty and strangeness of life at the same time. What will the next generation do here? It is sad to see young people follow Western trends so closely and rejecting their own culture. But I also see young Indonesians embraced a new collective culture, using new technologies and integrating traditional means to achieve a better world.
It is unfortunate that huge parts of culture are gone forever, as the water system Subak , which so well for so long. There is a rice field behind me where the farmer was forced to stop planting because there is more water than the old system. This is a country of such rich and diverse cultures. My hope is that they will learn from the mistakes of the West and make that leap into the future with its opportunities for sustainable development and clean, free energy and water. We must have dreams!
Thank you, Frederico! Visit www.federicotomasi.com or its page :. Federico Tomasi