About me
my passion and my story
Nice to see you here
My name is Vittorio Abbate and I’m a painter. I live in Ravello, a suggestive hamlet of the Amalfi Coast where I grew up with beauty and magic in my eyes.
Here I had my first encounters with art, in particular with the paintings that many artists came to exhibit in the summer in the churches or in the streets of the center, with ceramics that still fill the shelves and shop windows, with the sketches of the many travelers who stopped to capture a piece of my city lighting in me the curiosity for drawing and painting.
The beginning of my passion
It all started with a box of colors – tempera, crayons, chalks – won for a painting contest organized by a cultural association for the kids of my neighborhood, thanks to which I realized that this was the path I wanted to take.
I’ve taken many steps since then but the memory of that box still excites me. So I attended first the Art Institute “Filiberto Menna” in Salerno and, then, the Academy of Fine Arts in Naples, deepening, also thanks to the courses organized by the association In Form of Art, the pictorial techniques and comparing me with the so-called workshop.
They will, however, be the opportunities for travel – in Spain, Argentina, California – the meetings with some artists including Romano Ranieri and the Portuguese Manuel Cargaleiro thanks to which I confronted with the different possibilities of ceramics, Bryan Mark Taylor, former teacher of the Art Academy of San Francisco who introduced me to the en plein air movement very strong in the USA, and again Fabiola Sorolla, great grandson of the Castilian painter Joaquin Sorolla, to mark in a deeper way my current work oriented to painting en plein air.
Turning point
I remember with pleasure the stay in Argentina in 2011 where, in addition to finding a wife, I painted for the first time outdoors marveling at the curiosity of people, intriguing me for the sudden change of lights, shadows, for the variation of colors and atmospheres, Finally finding out what I wanted to do. Since then I have not stopped, practicing daily with what they show the countries and the landscape of the Amalfi Coast, losing myself in that association between man and nature that made it a World Heritage Site.
A path suspended between sky and sea, where architecture blends with the landscape, where history, the memory of places, emerges between ancient Arab-Norman buildings, three lemon groves, vineyards, on the doors and windows of houses, a maze that, riding my bike, I try daily to walk with the knowledge that getting lost is the only possibility contemplated.
After all, that box of colors was nothing more than an invitation to travel and discover, to the possibility of a life made of small joys in the country I love most: Ravello!
services
What I can create for you
Amalfi Coast paintings
Corners of paradise painted on canvas
my Ceramic
Hand painted in the streets of Ravello
Live wedding paintings
A special memory of your wedding