Lorenzo Di Mauro (b.1954)

"I was born and raised in Sicily, in a town at the foot of Mount Etna where, during my high school and university years, I used to ski intensely on. Skiing is one of my strongest passions.

Lorenzo Di Mauro.

"I began my career drawing comics and creating illustrations with brushes and airbrush.

"In 1981 I published my comic entitled Superpipe and an illustration on an Italian issue of Playboy magazine. During the same year I moved from Sicily to Rome and joined the Illustrators Association, which had just born in Italy.

"For a couple of years I continued to produce comics and illustrations, including the first works on pin-ups, beginning my collaboration as freelance illustrator with Italian subsidiaries of the most important international advertising agencies. During the 1980s, the advertising market in Italy offered alluring opportunities of financial reward and professional recognition and soon my time was booked up by these publicity work, made mostly of hyperreal illustrations.

"During the 1990s, my rapport with advertising remained quite intense, but I was no longer having much fun. I was curious about multimedia and I experienced the creation of a number of interactive CD ROM and animations for internet.

"In 2001, I went back to one of my first passions: the creation of pin-up paintings. Digital painting, that is, because at that point I had already substituted the brushes with the graphic tablet. I had began to learn how to use the computer during the 1990s, nevertheless continuing to use acrylic colours, brushes, and airbrush as I always had done before. Only after I found the means and the necessary manual skill to create with digital media almost all that I was creating with the natural media, I began using them professionally.

"Today I work almost exclusively in digital, though I work with the old tools for a few traditional illustrations and commissioned works."