The Compelling Duality of Giulia D’Anna Lupo
This article was originally published on Hue & Eye.
About Giulia D’Anna Lupo
Giulia D’Anna Lupo (b. 1974) is an established illustration artist, creative director, and art educator. Originally from Naples, Giulia currently lives and works in Paris. The journey that led her to France – where she lives since 2008 – is quite rich in details that she better explained to us during a very pleasant call.
Giulia has a bright voice enhanced by an extraordinary talent of depicting every tile of her story through a non-conventional attitude. What immediately arises while listening to her is the ability to contain a well-balanced perception of the outside world between the eyes of an adult and the words of a child, or vice versa. What Giulia gently and indirectly asks is to follow one’s instincts as a child yet to remain focused to ones deep reasonings, as an adult would do.
About Giulia’s Creative Approach
Stepping back to some years ago, Giulia was a very prolific child indeed. Her mother well understood her daughter’s lure towards drawing, dance, theatre, and whatever creative activity she could possibly dive into, so she always pushed her to study and deepen her talents. After accomplishing her classical studies, as a matter of fact, Giulia moved to Rome to apply at the Istituto Europeo di Design (IED), from which she achieved a diploma degree in Illustration with maximum grades in 1997. The funny fact is that Giulia was attending, in those same years, at another faculty too. She applied, truly enough, also at a BA in History of the Arts at La Sapienza in Rome. Her inquiring spirit brought her to test both her interests with the aim of better recognizing her primary expertise. Giulia soon discovered her demanding and acute approach to the arts, for which she often found herself involved in challenging contexts during her academic years. One of those Giulia highlighted the most is when she told her art teacher how to avoid depicting subjects she liked, as she thought an artists’ main challenge was to represent what he finds disturbing instead. Long story short, this approach is what brought Giulia to create illustrations full of daring and sexually related themes such as Boudoirs or Pelo, just to mention few. The sake of exploring human behaviors and boundaries rich in audacious scenarios while meshing pure sentiments with indiscrete ones is what led Giulia to what her art is recognized for today.
D’Anna Lupo is also teaching creative classes for both adults and kids, throughout Italy and France. Talking about the teachings, this is what Giulia describes as her inner natural flair. With kids especially, she feels confident about how the combination of creative tools together with an adulthood approach is a strategic and efficient mix to support kids in their growth process. Her talent builds upon the study of innovative communicative skills to manage human vulnerabilities through a lighter creative approach.
Giulia describes the art of drawing through an ancient perspective owned by Platon that she made one of the core lessons she teaches her students: one shouldn’t search for a drawing but rather find it. The idea of it has always existed, and one should only learn to recognize it.
Giulia also mentions one of her greatest sources of inspiration, the controversial french illustrator Tomi Ungerer, who published many children’s books in the US while also being prosecuted for his critics toward the American government regarding the Vietnam War. A combination of opposites towards which Giulia feels both familiar and attracted to.
Her illustrations were featured in Le Monde, Villa Médicis-Académie de France iǹ Rome, Electa Mondadori Edizioni, Flammarion, Glamour (Italy), Procter & Gamble and Unicef, just to mention a few.
