“A landscape clean and crisp in form and colour, rich in inspiration is all that an artist could wish for,” wrote Canadian artist Franklin Carmichael. Gozo’s landscape is an inspiration for artists, but how has it, the social context, the way of life and the small island environment influenced Gozitan artists, asks Veronica Stivala.

Genetics and geography

Austin Camilleri

Speaking about how he grew up to be an artist, Austin Camilleri quotes David Hockney: “The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you’re an artist.”

However, he admits that it is a little more complicated than that.

“I’m interested in art as a means of living life, a desire to try and discover new things, a drive, a necessity.”

Camilleri – who works with video, installation, sculpture and painting – was born into a family of artists. Although he grew up in Gozo, he notes how genetics probably made a deeper mark on his becoming an artist than geography, even if he was nurtured within the confines of the workshop. His parents are Gozitan but his grandfather, the first artist in the family tree, was of Maltese and French descent.

It was much later, he observes, that his consciousness matured when he was studying abroad.

Gozo has a magnetic wisdom

“Eventually, my early expression manifested itself in ways diametrically opposite to my visual upbringing.”

Although Camilleri is well travelled and his sources of inspiration are varied and widespread, Gozo’s influence remains.

“Gozo has a magnetic wisdom. The horizon first instils in us the respect for the immense and a little later the urge to escape this geographical limit.

“I returned to Gozo because I feel it is an ideal environment to produce and practise without distraction. There will always be traces of my roots in my work, in the way I feed on local traditions or crafts, but these are influenced by other international experiences. In this digital age, our work is simultaneously global and regional.”

Camilleri last exhibited locally in Victoria, Gozo, in 2011. A critique published on the website www.redwhitemt.com described Camilleri’s mixed media on paper works as shifting, “from social criticism to sharp humour; an absurd spectacle of politics and art floating as one in a limbo of rough splashes and symmetry where abstract and figurative coexist in aesthetic harmony”.

What influence, if any, did Gozo have on Camilleri’s outlook?

“I don’t make a distinction between the social outlook of Malta and Gozo,” he explains. “My recent work deals with notions of inverted archaeology and this social criticism is a more playful visual tool. I try to construct a friction within the work by building it in layers with multiple histories. A text, invented or adopted, serves on both the visual and conceptual level. Sometimes two opposing comments can co-exist within the same work.”

Veils of light

Mark Sagona

By its very nature, insularity is stifling and an artist needs to try to go beyond that. Mark Sagona confesses that Gozo’s social context hasn’t been of much inspiration, except perhaps for his interest in the sacred.

Indeed, when speaking of Sagona’s first personal exhibition in 2000 at the Ministry for Gozo, with a collection of largely figurative works inspired by the spatial concerns of analytical Cubism, the late art critic Emmanuel Fiorentino had written that the importance of that exhibition lay in the way it introduced something different in the largely conservative artistic ambience of Gozo.

For Sagona, Gozo presents a formidable challenge for the contemporary artist, since there is little real appreciation for modern and contemporary art – unfortunately many succumb to traditional and obsolete artistic expressions.

Sagona was born and bred within an artistic ambience. The fact that his father is an artist had an overwhelming impact on his upbringing. He was immersed in an art world which, albeit traditional, taught him a lot.

“When I was born my father was very busy on many artistic projects, including several in churches in Gozo. I was brought up in a busy studio where I witnessed many different artistic processes, including drawing, painting, sculpture, design and the production of stucco and other forms of decorative art.”

Indeed his childhood was very different to that of his friends and he accompanied his father wherever he went, even climbing up scaffolding in churches.

“My first toys were brushes, paints and the odd piece of canvas and clay lying around the studio. As time passed, I also started leafing through the many art books we had at home.”

This was also consolidated through his father’s friendship with a number of important Maltese artists such as Giuseppe Briffa.

“I think all this speaks for itself,” he confides, “and my natural calling to art was sealed with these experiences.”

Speaking further about experiences, the topic of the Gozitan landscape inevitably crops up. This remains an inescapable source of inspiration for many artists, especially for someone living in Gozo.

However, Sagona is not interested in the pretty picture but is more attracted to the abstract qualities which are “presented in nature, sieved through the artistic mind and soul”. His landscapes, he says, “are mere excuses for an excursion in colour, composition and texture.”

Interestingly, the main influence in his works is probably the extraordinary quality of light which is omnipresent in Gozo. In fact, the veils of light which Sagona has greatly experimented with in his art are the result of this.

My first toys were brushes, paints and the odd piece of canvas and clay lying around the studio

For example, the collection of abstract works presented in 2006, Visions of Light, showed this interest in the most explicit manner. Light remains a recurring element, even in the more representational works such as the collection of paintings presented in 2010/2011 at the Maltese Embassy in Paris, L’ame d’une île, celebrating the natural and cultural heritage of the Maltese Islands.

Trees a crowd

Charlene Calleja

Gozo was one of the reasons behind Charlene Calleja’s first exhibition. Entitled 365, the 2010 installation comprised 365 masks, each marking a different day of the year.

But the masks also represented another symbol associated with masks: putting on a façade.

“When you live on a small island, it is easy for people to find out stuff about you and for word to travel around,” explains Calleja. “You sometimes want to protect yourself and it is easier to build a façade rather than to express your opinions freely.”

The artist wanted to explore this oppression that pushes one to adopt a false front.

“I wanted to represent emotions and themes through the medium of masks,” she explains.

So this artist is to some extent influenced by Gozo. Because Gozo is a smaller island than Malta, she explains that she is influenced by the way of life, the smaller communities and the fact that more people know who you are and where you are from, unlike in Malta where most of the time she remains anonymous.

Although Calleja now been living in Gozo for quite some time, and her family is Gozitan, she has not always lived there, and admits that there is a part of her which still feels like an outsider.

Indeed some people have told her that at times her work is dark. She attributes this to her feeling somewhat detached from her home island.

“Even though you live on a small island where most people know each other, it does not automatically mean that you fit in – you can still feel isolated even though you are part of a small community.”

Calleja is currently working on paintings of trees, “but not just trees”. In her words: “The works are more an exploration of the human body transmogrified in trees. We have all at one point or another seen a face in a cloud. We have this innate desire to anthropomorphise objects.”

Calleja is interested in this desire to want to see our own likeness in the world around us, to put a human face on things and relate to them as if they were human. She has certainly been influenced by her environment to be able to see these figures and faces within trees.

“The inspiration behind these trees started when I was out walking one day and came across a tree in which I saw a number of figures within its bark. I started seeing more trees which inspired me to see more figures or faces and the series started from there.

“So I guess you could say that the landscape in Gozo has influenced me in this respect – maybe if I had not encountered these particular trees I wouldn’t have embarked on these works.”