Lesley Smitheringale Fine Art

Featured Artist - Nicholas Di Genova

Nicholas Di Genova was born in Toronto in 1981 and works like a portraitist documenting the post-human future. He draws and paints horrific, yet innocent machine/animal carcass hybrids, building a protective community. Each character has its own unique and detailed story, as though from a yet unwritten comic book. In the over-arching story, the machines have taken to incorporating animal parts in the monster vehicles they build. It’s the old carcass-as-infrastructure routine.Di Genova’s characters often appear first in ink on paper. Making post-human robotic anthropomorphism look so hopeful and, well, human, is a feat in itself. Di Genova draws life into all his creatures through meticulous detail. Animal hides rot and scar with myriad dots and patches, carefully rendered in greys and greens against pink and blue backdrops.by Kevin Temple from nowtoronto magazine

Nicholas Di Genova spends over 12 hours a day in his studio, working with abstract ideas and ambitions that makes for inverted normality found in art galleries across North America.

l to r: “Chicken Hounds”, “Greater Turkey-Hydra” & “Upright Shepherd Waddler”

Nicholas tells Jordan Chalifoux from format magazine

I’m from a pretty small town and when I was there, there wasn’t really much to do. There was an arcade and comic book store. So, I really got into comics when I was a kid and read comics for eight years and I started drawing my own comics. I started making up all these creatures, I was always much more into the monster comics and super hero comics and then when I moved to Toronto I started to get into street art and use that imagery on the street.

For a lot of my work, my technique is pretty straightforward, ink and watercolour on paper. I use a lot of source materials in my work, so my studio is totally covered in layers of books. For the mylar paintings (the stuff with colour), the technique is very similar to that of traditional animators: ink on one side of the mylar, animation paint on the other. I use a dipping pen for all of my ink work, which somewhat explains the areasof drips; sometimes those damn things just explode and really f… stuff up.

from art & design magazine

Nicholas Di Genova’s website

Nicholas Di Genova’s blog

Person Nicholas Di Genova

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