About Paolo Andrea Deandrea

I worked in publishing and advertising as illustrator, journalist and cartoonist. Since 2015 I started to paint a series of subjects in acrylic colors on canvas and wood, "le Moschine", a small crowd of surreal, bewildered, funny and a little melancholy characters, who take up the style and characters of American cartoons of the 1920s - 1930s.

I paint in an attic above the house where I live. I like it very much, it is a small, welcoming and intimate environment, where I have been drawing illustrations and comics for more than twenty years. In the summer, I often paint in the garden in the open air.

In illustration and strips, I started classically with inks and liquid watercolors, then moving on to digital coloring with Photoshop. In the long run, however, digital design, which is perfectly suited to editorial production, is a bit frustrating. Nothing tangible remains of your work. This is why a few years ago I started painting on canvas and wood, to return to the pleasure of painting and create an object that exists in the real world, which you can touch. I use acrylic colors, chalks, pastels, colored pencils, which I then finish with semi-gloss transparent protective varnishes. I love seeing my works finished and framed. I often use vintage frames that you buy in flea markets or small antique shops, which I then arrange and paint. I really like using decorated and gilded frames, which create a fun contrast with cartoon subjects. Cartoon is the way of telling that I have always found the most natural, pleasant and spontaneous, and the "primitive" ones have a particular charm, a very strong evocative power. I was pleasantly surprised to see how much this perception is shared even by a very young audience, very distant culturally and age-related from that period. Even in the following decades, formidable cartoons were drawn, authentic masterpieces, and it is very true. But those of the 20s and 30s, and the music that accompanied them, have (at least for me) something more. They are not vintage, they are really "ancient": they represent the origins of a world and an era, they are almost mythical archetypes. In cartoon language they correspond to the “far, far away country” of fairy tales. My current work is halfway between painting and illustration, and is strongly inspired by American cartoons of the early decades of the 1900s: Felix the Cat, Betty Boop, the very first Warner and Disney productions. I recognize in those cartoons a strength and a naive and savage spirit that have gradually softened and sweetened in subsequent productions. Noisy, cheerful, romantic, but also grotesque, violent and cruel.

They speak a childish but not affected language, much more authentic and sincere than their more tame and reassuring successors.

Signs, colors, shapes and story are simple and peremptory. They move in a very dangerous world, a far west where at every step you can receive a piano on your head, a stick of dynamite, be tied up, beaten, cut in two with a hatchet, blown up. And in the next frame, quietly resume walking whistling. They are funny, simple, grotesque, a little silly; sometimes even disturbing and dramatic, but without taking themselves too seriously and never abandoning their stubborn, senseless, stubborn faith in what the next frame holds.