CHARACTER DESIGN
ALEX SOBO
ITALIAN ARTIST OF REALISM MOVEMENT
Born: 3rd May 1855, Venice, Italy.
Died: 8th August 1892, Paris, France.
EARLY LIFE AND CHILDHOOD:
Sobo was born into an Old Italian family. They lived over to the countryside, where he enjoyed a happy country childhood. His artistic inclinations were encouraged by his mother, an amateur painter. As his 10th birthday approached his mother got really sick and sadly died, leaving the boy and his father in sorrow. A year later his father passed away and now Sobo was left on his own. An eleven-year-old boy, Sobo was taken by some strangers, a group of artistic people. He merged into them in no time and learned their art. This was a gang of ART FORGERS they had traveled around the world stealing and forging different pieces of art. Paintings, sculptures, installations etc. as he grew older, he learned to make duplicates of any type of painting there was. He copied, mimicked every stroke, color, light, line etc. everything making the duplicate exactly as the original. He also had a wish that one day he’ll be a recognized Artist also at the same time didn’t want to get caught so he had unique signature styles he used to put on each of his works, either forgery or original. The word mark or logo SOBO cleverly incorporate in the paintings hence hiding in plain sight. By the time he was 19 he had fooled almost all the art specialist around the world by his forgeries but soon luck ran out, in a heist in Paris while replacing the original painting with his counterfeit he was caught and went to prison, he thought that his gang would come for him and he spent 3 years in jail. The gang never came and he bathed in anger until he met a fellow inmate almost like him, betrayed by his people, he help Sobo come on the bright side of things he helped his use his aggression to paint what was right in front i.e. Realities or just daily routine of life. His main goal of now was to depict the positives and negatives of everyday life. From here he stared creating his own original pieces. It was the time in jail that was the golden time period for his art. It was the time when developed his own artistic style and that basically led to realism. When he was in jail he realized the “lack of freedom” in his art and started developing his own artistic style. He used to paint was reality and truth. Most of the time his subject of painting was suffering of people either in jail or in real life. And one of his paintings made in jail got very famous. In his paintings there was no imaginary or fictional characters. His work was purely based on the truth and reality that he had seen and experienced
The colors were almost natural and looked lively as if looking at a photograph now a days. The color palette for his prison series was mostly dark and dulls.
ARTISTIC STYLE:
His style soon formed uniqueness after all the influence of copying, turns out he enjoyed most when painting heavy textured strokes and all at once smooth ones. He also painted scenes from his time in jail, self-portraits, his most popular painting was self-imprisonment where he portrayed himself behind bars, betrayed by his gang feeling sad and lost all hopes of ever again seeing the great blue skies.
HIS SKETCH “SELF-IMPRISONMENT”
In early days spent in jail he started working on his own artistic style. He didn’t had medium at that moment so he used coal and starting drawing all his feelings and experiences in his artwork. He made many sketches one of his famous was the one in which he showed himself suffering from depression in jail as he was betrayed by his gang. In this Sketch we can see he is sitting lonely and lost in his thoughts. The environment of the room is very miserable and we can feel the quietness in the room. We can see what he is feeling at that moment. He sketched this artwork by using dark and light shadows. We can see that his depression was an obstacle in developing his artistic style. But one day he was lost in thoughts and he realized that his experiences and his feelings are the key to his artistic style. This was moment his work started to have realist characteristics. His body posture shows that he is resting his face on right hand and his left hand is on his lap. He is stuck in some past memories. While in the surroundings we can see there are his sketching material. We can see details in the walls created by dark and shadows that indicates the poor maintenance of the cell. He also made few sketches of the fellows in other cells and showed reality and bitter truth in his art. After getting out of jail he also painted what was in front of him using oil paints on canvas and he enhanced artistic style in his studio.
