Essential to the World: The Art of Marco Mazzoni

A little enlightened lusciousness for your Tuesday...

Volume 20 of Hi-Fructose Magazine (in stands now) did a piece on Marco Mazzoni, an Italian artist who does amazing, drop dead gorgeous fantastical drawings exploring women, nature and the suppression of the feminine principle -and the loss of knowledge and leadership that comes with such suppression.

Here are a few clips from the interview done by Kirsten Anderson:

Hi-Fructose: What inspired you to start working with botanical imagery? Is there a symbolic meaning behind the plants that you choose to use in each piece?

Marco Mazzoni: I specifically use medicinal plants as a subject. I come from a farming family, the plants are the medicines my mom used to give me…When I was a child a potato cured skin burns and the rosemary bush cured stomachache. In the past, the woman was the head of the family system; their knowledge was the basis for the life of an entire city. Now the knowledge of plants has been lost…with m work I want to bring back th eimportance of interaction between women and plants. I depict m any species of flowers, but my favorites are the stramonium, lilium and hibiscus…I use the flowers and the plants considered medicinal; flowers that are now considered  just aesthetically beautiful, but which also have healing properties and are hallucinogenic.

HF: The creatures you use in your work are all winged- does that have a meaning for you?

MM: The flight is often an important part of a hallucination. (In fact, traditional stories of witches who flew around broomsticks were inspired by the weightless, out of body feelings transmitted by ointments applied to the body that delivered hallucinogens topically through the skin) In Italy, in some ancient rites, hallucinogens were used in order to make a person shamanistically “commune” or identify with particular animals. I choose more often to portray the butterfly and the hummingbird because, to me, they exemplify the fragility of nature and perfection of it also. I like to speak about the power of “mater” (mother) and woman through animals that seem delicate, but are essential for the world.

 

oh and by the way - all these drawings were done in colored pencil!

For more lusciousness, click on a pic to go to his site.