CHIARA BARTALI

Cluster Exhibitor | Cluster Illustration | Alternative Fair 2021

Born in Volterra (Italy), Chiara (a.k.a. Mim) discovered her passion for drawing as a kid, and has always wanted to be an artist.

After graduating from the artistic lyceum, she attended the course of theatrical scenography at the Brera Accademy of Fine Arts (Milano). After finishing this course, she enrolled in a master's degree in Illustration and Concept Art in Florence. During the master, Mim becomes passionate about illustrated stories and she rediscovers drawing as a means to tell about herself, her stories and her emotions.

Mim loves to experiment by unifying different techniques. She is a highly emotional artist and the artistic current which inspires her the most is expressionism. Mim is currently working on her own projects, books, and stories.

Chiara's (Mim) creative process is very slow and meditative, almost a contemplative act. She loves studying every little detail inherent to the theme she has to face, looking for historical and cultural references that can enhance the concept she wants to convey, and always adding a personal point of view. She often likes to quote works by famous artists or insert small details related to pop culture to create a certain atmosphere or awaken connections and memories.

Mim mainly uses cold and desaturated colors, especially she loves to move on the palettes of blue and green contrasted with red or orange. Using digital programs, she can compose images using photos, magazine clippings, textures and patterns created in traditional way, then combining everything with digital painting. She loves experimenting with shapes and proportions, looking for contrast that increase the expressive power, but also a compositional balance.

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One of the authors who most stimulates Mim is Italo Calvino, whose visionary writing leads to fantastic worlds, but at the same time provides important insights into society and the human being. Inspired by one of the Cosmicomics stories, Mim has created a small project. In it, she depicted the Daughters of the Moon as imposing and divine women, taking a cue from Matisse's primitivism and expressionism. Within the central illustration, she then inserted references to her childhood, to those "forgotten" things that we carry with us and to which we should give new life, just as the daughters of the moon drag the tired moon towards rebirth. Still on Cosmicomics, she would like to develop a more complex and articulated project, in order to tell all the stories of the book through her drawings.