Camillo Vena the painter, engraver and designer was born in 1940, in Milan. As a figurative, portrait and landscape painter, he is defined as the great master of colour.
He has long been a disciple of two great masters of figurative painting: Parmigiani and Tommasini. He graduated from the Castello Sforzesco high school in Milan, specialised in fresco painting. Vena prefers to paint historicised, traditional and conventional subjects on his painting tripod, and female figures, landscapes and still-lifes, in particular. Female images represent the majority of his work: girls, teens and mature women, depicted as they are busy reading, meditating melancholics, mirroring themselves or showing a nakedness which is never vulgar.
His canvases representing landscapes feature recurring figures of little men and women who stare into space, sit on rocks facing the sea, or in the high meadows that sit below the mountains, in the flowered countryside or between sheaves and canals. Everything is represented with a palette that enhances the physicality of paint- mainly green and blue which are Vena’s elective colours as master of deep shadows and bright transparency. His still-lifes reveal a careful study of composition, an expert study of view and perspective: there is a dense, colourful texture in them and, as in his landscapes, there is the careful study of light to dark; the subjects (pots and bouquets of colourful flowers, sunflowers , juicy watermelons, grapes, pomegranates and shiny) are presented for what they are, no tricks. He has held many exhibitions at galleries including: Ars Italica, Treves Gallery, Tesio Art Gallery, Wars Gallery, Gallery of artists and Vanni Gallery, Pablo Neruda Gallery in Cinisello Balsamo, The Visconti Rho Gallery, I Portici Gallery in Tradate, Bruno Pessotto Gallery in Varese and the Green Triangle in Rome. He came second place, with a score of 76/100, for the De Paoli National Award in Carbonara.
