Newington Green meets West Africa Festival Print

"Mary Cinque is an Italian painter, graphic designer and blogger working and living in the Amalfi Coast. Her works – joyful, bright, colourful painting and drawings – are inspired by this place, as well as her heritage, background and travels. Mary spent her childhood between Italy and Ethiopia. Before moving back to the Amalfi Coast in 2019, she has lived in Naples and Milan, where she attended academies of fine art; and Philadelphia, New York and London where she improved her artistic skills and style. Alongside making art, she works as an illustrator and graphic designer, collaborating with selected brands, working on artistic commissions such as illustrations, labels and showroom design. Cinque’s art develops themes connected with what makes us essentially humans: our habitat – the buildings, the streets, the cities – our bodies, what we eat and how we socialise. Art, in Mary’s paintings, becomes a powerful instrument of philosophical investigation which reveals who we really are by questioning our habits, observing those characteristic traits we share as a species, often without realising it. The artist looks at human beings from a different perspective, making interesting and significant what can seem normal or banal to us in our everyday life: the buildings that populate our cities, the streets we walk, people sitting across our table at a café, strangers on the bus. In this nutshell interview by Giulia Corti, Mary Cinque explores some of the most relevant aspects of her art and reflects on how it offers an intriguing and informative perspective about the way we live as human animals. Mary, your art is colourful and vivid, it mixes human and urban subjects by making use of various techniques (oil painting; pastel drawing, markers, “digital” drawing, print-making etc.) and materials (canvasses, magazine pages, an I-pad screen). How do you choose the means with which to develop an artwork and how do the different materials and techniques influence what you want to convey, if they do? Different subjects call for different techniques. Buildings and urbanscape are always acrylic on canvas, while I prefer to depict people using a quicker, immediate approach, like the one that I can get with markers and oil pastels or digital painting. By looking at the main themes of your art, it is possible to notice what seems to be a tension. On one hand, you portrayed the stillness and artificiality of urban landscapes and buildings (e.g.