Daniela Astone

Daniela Astone paints in oil, on linen and on wooden panels prepared with gesso, and draws in charcoal and chalk. Her training is that of the Florentine atelier: drawing and painting from the live model, the slow construction of form, direct observation. She moves freely between the figure, the portrait, the self-portrait, still life and landscape, often painted en plein air in the Tuscan hills. This discipline is also the rhythm of her life: she describes a daily studio routine, "from 9 a.m. to 4 or 5 p.m.", where the point is to paint every day, "even if only a small thing".

After twenty years spent teaching and then directing an academic programme, she describes her current work as a deliberate loosening of that craft: "today I try to forget all the technical aspects in order to free myself and finally express myself without constraint" (Daniela Astone, "AS IS" interview, arvme.com).

The "Albe" (Dawns) project shows the measure of this search. From 8 October 2020 to 7 October 2021, during the Italian lockdowns, she painted the sunrise from her door every morning: 365 paintings. She wrote: "Every day is born differently each time. […] The somewhat tiring ritual of getting up before dawn to honour life awakened in me curiosity and the desire to put question marks where until then there had only been statements. Every important change begins with knowing how to imagine it." (Daniela Astone, project text, Florence Academy of Art; translated from Italian.)

Daniela Astone was born in 1980 in Pisa and grew up in Porto Santo Stefano, a small coastal town in the Tuscan Maremma. She began her art training at fourteen at the art high school in Grosseto, graduating in 1998. She then moved to Florence to study illustration at the International School of Comix; from her second year she worked freelance for several publishers and within the Inklink illustration studio.

At twenty-one she changed direction and took up the study of drawing and painting from life at the Florence Academy of Art, under Daniel Graves. She taught younger students there from her second year of study, graduated in 2004 with the end-of-year prize, and stayed on at the school as principal instructor. Her first solo exhibition, at the Ann Long Fine Art Gallery in Charleston in 2005, led her to set up her own studio in the Tuscan countryside.

In 2013 she became director of the intermediate programme at the Florence Academy of Art, a post she held until 2022, when she left to devote herself full-time to her studio work. She still teaches, in particular landscape painting workshops held at her home studio in Chianti and during stays abroad, and has collaborated in this capacity with Streamline and East Oaks Studio. In 2019, with Gaia Grazioli, she curated the exhibition "Corpo a Corpo" at the Villa Bardini museum in Florence, under the scientific coordination of Carlo Sisi and with the support of the Fondazione CR Firenze. She now lives and works in Chianti, south of Florence.