I always paint with music.
It is my air, my invisible palette, the oxygen of this atmosphere I call Art. Without it, color remains mute. Every brushstroke seeks a rhythm, a chord, a vibration capable of breaking the white and menacing silence of the canvas.
For this reason, many protagonists of my paintings come from the musical world. I have portrayed them because their voices continue to sing within me: Dalla, Battisti, Vasco Rossi, Bob Marley, Jim Morrison, and many others already painted and many more yet to be encountered in my colorful and unpredictable trajectories.
They are not just faces: they are sounds, rhythms, eras, memories. Each one has left an imprint that becomes an image.
With Armstrong, the trumpet becomes as yellow as the sun of New Orleans that never sets. Amy Winehouse brings with her an elegant velvety black, which scratches but consoles. De André has the color of the sea and the slanting wind of the squares of Genoa. Bowie lights up the mysterious red of distant planets. Bob Marley is green, is gold, is the slow and blue beat of the heart of the tropics.
Painting is not silent. Every canvas, if you look at it enough, in the right way, suddenly begins to produce a sound. It is the moment when it starts to vibrate in tune with the soul. A painting can be a guitar solo, a symphony orchestra, a choir you never forget. Painting is like tuning invisible instruments, seeking the harmony that holds together shapes and emotions. The brush is the conductor's baton.
And then there is the deeper connection: music and painting do not live only in art, but accompany us in life. Every season of our existence has a soundtrack and a color. The song of first love, the melody of a journey, the piece that comforted us in a loss, the one that sparked a party. Notes mark our days like brushstrokes on time. So do paintings, which remain to bear witness to emotions, encounters, turning points. Milestones at the edges of that road called life.
Music teaches us that there is not just one way to feel emotion. There is classical, symphonic, chamber music. There is popular, rock, jazz, pop. All have the same dignity: it is not the form that matters, but the intensity with which they touch us. Painting should be considered in the same way. There should be classical painters and rockstar painters, jazz painters and pop painters. Because a work of art, like a song, does not belong only to museums or the most solemn stages: it belongs to those who look at it, to those who feel it, to those who carry it inside.
I believe that a painting is listened to, just as a song is watched. It is in that transition that art is born: when a color becomes a melody, when a voice becomes an image, when what we see and what we hear meet to tell us the same thing, with two different languages. Music and painting intertwine like two threads of the same weave: both tell stories of emotions, both keep us company along the stages of life. I have made it my way of painting, but everyone carries their own colors and their own notes.
And you? What is the song that changed your life, or the image that still resonates within you today?
Tell me in the comments: because even a shared story can become art, if you know how to listen to it.
