Portrait of an Artist: Mauro Marzari

Our little town has many public spaces for art and culture events. These continue to provide me with opportunities to discover new artists.

During a recent evening walk in the city centre, I came across the poster of an art exhibition by local artists at the Toaldi-Capra Palace and I immediately decided to take a look. Apart from some lovely watercolours, the exhibition had a few collages with mixed materials, which immediately caught my attention. All the exhibits were without titles or names of the artists. Thus, I went to ask information about the artist of the collages and discovered that he was present in the room. This is how I met Mauro Marzari, the "reluctant" artist of those collages.

This post presents my short conversation with him.

Artistic Journey of Mauro Marzari

Mauro is from Piovene Rocchette, a small town located some 7-8 km from Schio. Mauro has retired after a lifetime of working in public administration.

He explained that he was always interested in arts, and he dabbled in oil paintings. However, he decided to be sensible and look for a stable job, and not try to become an artist.

Many years later, when his family responsibilities were done, he decided to go back to his first love, the arts and joined a four years' degree course in arts at an evening course run by the Institute of Arts in Schio, while continuing to work full-time. The course gave him an opportunity to learn and experiment with different painting and sculpture techniques, and discover his own ideas about the kind of art he wanted to create.

The 5 works of Mauro, that I saw in the exhibition, all have a distinct style - they are collages with acrylics and paper. I liked all the 4 works and I think that I can look at them for long time and discover new details. My favourite is the canvass with a predominant blue colour (below).

Becoming an Artist

While talking to him, it came out that he does not feel that he can define himself as an artist, though he loves art and spends a lot of time making art. He feels that artists are persons who have dedicated their lives to the craft and have suffered all the hardships of the life for their art. About himself, he feels that he had a comfortable life and came to art when he was stable and did not have financial and family worries. Thus, he never suffered for his art.

This discussion reminded me of my feelings of being an imposter as an "Indian writer" at the Grinzane Awards in Turin in 2007, which had a focus on Indian writers and I had collaborated with them for inviting some Hindi writers. At that time, I had written a few stories and ran blogs in Hindi, English and Italian, but I did not have a book to my name and for me that was the criteria for being a writer. Now that I have completed my second novel, I feel more comfortable in being called a writer.

In the End

I loved Mauro's works. I hope that he can continue to find joy in his art and continue to develop and explore new areas as an artist.

In the end it does not matter the label we give ourselves or the labels others give us. In this era of attention-hungry influencers and publicity-peddlers, it is good to be humble and insecure, and enjoy what we do without feeling the need to show-off. 

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