Be Our Guest ... Cristina Dalla Valentina

by Dotti

Today we’re introducing a new feature at Focusing on Life, a monthly guest blogger. We’ll be spotlighting members of our own Focusing on Life family as well as other inspiring people from around our online community. And now,  it is indeed a pleasure to present to you our first guest, Cristina Dalla Valentina. I’ll let her tell you about herself in her own words.

I am an Italian watercolor painter and I live in Verona with my husband, two children and a cat. I love painting nature and the emotions it stirs inside me.I create landscapes of the soul which can touch the imagination of the beholder and in turn be filled by them with their feelings, emotions and memories.

I am a painter in love with photography. According to what I feel, painting and photography are interconnected worlds in themselves, not simply because I draw the subjects for my paintings from my snaps. To a person who has never enough of images, photography is somewhat of a need and I feel it even more needful as it helps me to see what I would not be able to notice otherwise. Looking through the camera lens is one of the main means I use to find inspirations, to really see life in the deep.

Through photography I discover beauty in every day life: even the most mundane objects and situations turn out to be meaningful and enliven the emotions that I express through painting.

Through photography I establish a relationship with its subject, listening to it and trying to represent what it inspires in me, be it a tree, an animal, a person…

Through photography I can see the correspondences between colors and shapes in the world around me, the colors that are hidden, the things that are not apparent to the eye and these ones I try to paint with watercolors.

Through photography I learn how to connect and enhance all the colors and shapes that I see in my paintings. For instance, in the tree foliage I also paint the colors of the sky, the shape of a flower, my daughter's smile and so on: in short, everything seeping into my eyes and into my soul through the camera lens before I touch paper with my brush.

Through photography I focus on life and through painting I express my true voice in life as well.

When I bathe in nature and I stop - admiring at a tree that pushes its branches towards the sky, as if it wanted to touch it with its fingers; when I observe reality through the lens of my camera and I can see the extraordinary in everyday life; when I look at my watercolors while they are spreading on the sheet in an endless and ever-changing play of color and light, then I feel alive. Then I feel that I can touch the sky with my fingers too.

You can find Cristina on her blog: http://cristinaswatercolors.blogspot.it/

or her Flickr page: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ablobofcolor/

and Instagram: @cristinadallavalentina.

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Don't forget - if you want a chance to win one of the beautiful posters Terri told us about on Monday, you need to enter a comment or write a post on your own blog, with a link back to FOL, and then leaving your blog link in your comment. Somebody has to win ... it might as well be YOU!