FAA Arts Scholarship Recipient – Santino Sfrengeu
FAA proudly welcomes to its membership, Santino Sfrengeu! Santino is the recipient of FAA’s first – of what we hope will be an annual – “Investing in the Artist of Tomorrow Scholarship.”
An art major student at Folsom Lake College, Santino’s medium of preference is pen and ink, although he also enjoys painting (in watercolor, acrylic, and oil), and even clay and ceramics.
Santino describes himself as “very competitive” and always trying to push himself to do his absolute best. He did add, though, he is working on enjoying it more and straining a bit less.
Toward that end, Santino plans to use his scholarship money to continue his art studies, and in particular, is looking forward to courses in portrait and figure drawing. Here are a few examples of some of his favorite works so far.
“Small Chair”
This painting involved an assignment to combine realism and abstract. The realism has been simplified and enlarged, where the chair has been simplified and shrunken. The color choice was closer to an analogous complementary, where red and yellow are the main colors, and the green ground is to contrast with these colors. The background and ground give a desolate feeling, where the vibrant forms radiate warmth and come forward and cast large shadows over the very small chair.
“Watcher #3”
Watcher #3 is the third in a series of 3 drawings. It is done on a sketch paper with a micron pen. It consists of contour lines that define the shape of the tree and the implied light sources providing shadows. The three eyes lie along the rule of thirds and are looking in 3 different directions. This drawing is a push of surrealism and focuses more on the detail of the eyes and tree rather than the fore and background.
“Abstract Orange”
Here, there are multiple techniques of masking, salt textures, and lifting. It is done with watercolor, using phthalo blue, and an orange made from cadmium yellow light and cadmium red. The large triangles were made prior to the orange and blue swirls which. The swirls overlap the existing color creating different layers of glazing and pure hues.