About
Italian watercolorist Maximilian Damico paints primarily on location. He observes city sidewalks and intersections, looking for not the most famous scenes but the most interesting. With quick, lively brushstrokes, Maximilian captures the energy and mood of cities whether in the rain, gloom, or rush hour. The frenetic quality of city life doesn’t detract from the beauty of each scene. Maximilian’s gestural technique instead infuses liveliness in each artwork, a liveliness that makes being in a big city a never-ending thrill.
I usually work on location, just sometimes I do several sketches of the same theme and then I go to complete it in the studio...usually I do finish a painting one going on (this is essential in my technique). I do not mind about famous sight seen, but I like walk in some place to find an aesthetic details or an interesting game shadow/light.
Basically I approach the painting with a separate palette warm and cold colour, the contrast lets have an interesting three-dimensional and plastic effect; I try every time to move the brush as fast as I can, to catch the movement, that I am seeing in reality, on the paper...that lets the painting get the energy and the vibrations that I am constantly looking for in my style; I can use a very wet paper and brush full of water sometimes I use very dry colour......I never use very tiny size brushes for small details...but I am interested in the big block of masses, their contrast make the beauty in a painting.
I was born in south Italy, and took courses of painting in Academy of Fine Arts in Naples; after the Fine Art 'Diploma', I left south Italy to have broader contact with the international Art scene, following different routes: as Barcelona, London, Paris, New York and Prague: where I maturated my own style made by semi abstract elements and expressionist executions and techniques. I spent 5 years in this kind of wandering life, always looking for areas of visibility, collaboration and contracts with Art Galleries. Meanwhile I was achieving and accomplishing a good number of success and desires, has grown in me the germ of dissatisfaction: an awful virus in a mind of an Artist. For this reason I went back to my own village in Italy on Amalfi Coast, to dig in myself: where after a while , for joke, I applied for a watercolour art contest . Never tried this technique, but immediately I fell in love with the medium: since then It started my self taught apprenticeship with the technique made by observing and absorbing the talent of the greatest watercolour master from the past : like G Gigante and J Sargent. The Watercolour has twisted my interior world and changed the way how to look at the external world. In the last year I was awarded at 2 Art Project made in Austria and Spain and opened several workshops in Italy and Prague (Czech Rep.): that gave me the final push to carry on in the fluid world of the Watercolour!