Martino Sciolino

art: martina sciolino

SCIOLINO

A RTIST M ARTINA S CIOLINO b l u rs l i n e b e t we e n

ART & POP CULTURE STORY AND PHOTOS BY VALERIE WELLS

40 • south mississippi scene

An eBay shopping addiction inspired Martina Sciolino to start painting large pictures of toys. Searching for vintage clothes online one day, Sciolino came across thousands of images of vintage toys. What really sparked her imagination were plastic dolls and figures from the early 20th Century. She couldn’t take her eyes off the images. “There’s childlike play and a little bit of gothic,” she said. Her large oil paintings capture the childlike yet gothic characters. The images fill her Parkhaven home in Hattiesburg, peeking around corners in

the hallway. Big eyes in round faces in a background of bright colors look out on her studio. Sciolino is a multi-talented renaissance woman. She is an English professor at the University of Southern Mississippi who also sings jazz with a band on the weekends. She trained as a dancer when she was a teenager. And now she paints. She likes the intensity and texture of oil paints. It captures the pop-culture sensibility of the vintage dolls. She considers her work part of a contemporary genre called pop surrealism. The shapes and faces aren’t too different from anime and

magna characters imported from Japan. Not all the dolls are cute and quaint. That appeals to Sciolino. “They are strange, macabre and slightly offensive,” she admits. A year ago, she wanted to explore her artistic fascination with these pop-culture toys. She went to a sculpture workshop in Vermont. When she got back to Hattiesburg, she decided painting was something she could do in the home easier. Art exhibits in New York, Philadelphia and Nashville all contributed to Sciolino’s visions. Contemporary artist Takashi Murakami influences her style

in blurring the line between art and pop culture. Other artists she admires include abstract expressionists Jackson Pollack and Willem de Kooning and quirky portrait artist Francis Bacon. The literature professor and writing teacher describes her work as non-narrative. “I like the figures to exist in space. There’s an absence of content. I take things out of their normal context,” she said. “This is where my ambition meets my interests and ability. It’s a balance between the intellectual and the physical.”

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