I was born in Milan in 1976. Before the age of ten, outside hotels during summer holidays, I would waylay the elderly sitting at tables for my first rudimentary portraits. One of them, on the day of departure, left on the table The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Jonathan Livingston Seagull with an affectionate dedication. The stationery shop owner in Lavagna, Liguria, had had her warehouse flooded. She did not want to throw away the box of colours and the drawing paper, so she gave them to me: they smelled of mould but they fuelled my first paintings. After art school — during which, however, I painted little, as a passion for history prevailed — came a degree, a doctorate, a profession I enjoy, and the temporary abandonment of my brushes. Through light and watercolour, I like to portray people. It is a debt contracted with the manuals of my childhood, in particular those by Betty Edwards and Charles Reid, gifts from my father. I love squinting to catch the light that describes a face and observing the anonymous shape that separates two objects: the one that, if you draw it, describes everything around it. I am happy when I rest the pad of paper on my knees and, sitting on a rock, fill the plastic cup from the bar with water and recycle the napkins; when I listen to a passer-by who comments; when I convince friends to let me portray them. I have exhibited watercolours in a solo show at San Protaso in Milan (November 2023), in the White Noise exhibition at Monat Gallery in Madrid, at the Brussels Art Fair (November 2023) and at the Paris Art Fair (January 2024).