Claudio Orso
Claudio Orso
Claudio Orso Giacone is a print, paper and clay artist from Torino, Italy, and lives in Ohio. He has exhibited his prints across the US and in Europe. Early participant to a state-sponsored Reggio Emilia pedagogy study group, he applied this approach to a very wide range of audiences and academic levels, and maintains to date a strong commitment to art practice and sharing as a service for the community. Past experiences include ArtZreach, a project of art process and education for teens at the Lorain County Juvenile Detention Home, and the Oberlin Big Parade, an all-town event featuring a procession of home-made floats and acts from community groups. Orso works as visiting artist for several organizations in Cleveland, and has been the first artist resident at the Morgan Conservatory and Art of Papermaking, where he is an instructor and was recently chosen for the NEA Apprenticeship grant. He collaborated to create and run the Apollo Outreach Initiative at Oberlin College, a project of media literacy in practice, bringing college students to mentor young and older participants in the community in narrative and documentary short film productions. Orso has also worked as featured and outreach artist for the Parade the Circle, an historical celebration organized by the Cleveland Museum of Art.
My mind finds solace carving wood blocks and facing the countless accidents and serendipitous adjustments that happen when trying to get a picture across; in pursuing the work’s ‘doneness’ we are afforded satisfaction behind the initial challenge, because the medium has antagonistic nature, and wood’s personality (made of grain, direction and density) questions with force our composition choices, and makes us negotiate the picture with sharp gouges and sculptor’s problem-solving strategies.
The reward of a finished print, that priceless joy of peeling off a fresh image impressed on paper, is the result of ritualized movements, of alchemical ponderings at the sound of the ink rolled on the slab by the brayer, of deliverance through the circular burnishing motions of the wooden spoon, of delight in witnessing the arc of an idea from a pencil doodle to a loud oily ink mark of strong edges and deep shadows, something with presence…
Relief print is a craft I learned in seventh grade, and still enjoy today, actually even more.
I am constantly writing down notes and quotes, mostly in English because it is a fascinating language when observed as “second language,” and sketching about several pieces at the same time, while trying to take care as promptly as feasible of the pressing ones.
Family, traveling, the daily observation of my fellow humans, and news are my greatest inspiration, and the woodcuts I make try to record and retain the flavor of distinct events, places and situations I lived or simply imagined; the symbolical nature of occurrences, statements expressed through words and gestures, things I see or read about and remember, the ones I fear and the ones urgent, all this I try to translate into visual presentations and allegories, as if we could understand them further because ideally isolated in the limelight, or observed through a viewfinder, dancing in a world between black and white.
