Biography

Valentino Camiletti has always loved nature, and his scientific knowledge of fauna and flora (particularly Alpine flora) owes much to his past as an illustrator for specialist magazines such as Reserves naturelles (Brussels's review of nature reserves and ornithology).

He has also illustrated for the C.E.B.O. (the Flanders equivalent of the Italian Lipu) and for the WWF. Painting has been a passion in his blood since he began executing copies of Impressionist and Flemish masters at a young age for the Museo Civico in Como. Self-taught oil painting, however, was no longer enough for him, and eager to learn new techniques, he attended the European Institute of Design in Milan. There, in addition to learning tempera, watercolor, airbrush, and pastel, he specialized in naturalistic drawing and animal anatomy.

His technique, known as "mixed," typically includes watercolor, gouache, pastel, and occasionally acrylic. In recent years, so frenetic and somewhat superficial for conventional art, always subservient to fashion and the pursuit of abstruse digital techniques, Camiletti decided to deepen his artistic knowledge personally and as a self-taught artist. He passionately studied the works of the old masters of the Italian and Flemish Renaissance. He dusted off the ancient workshop techniques of the 14th and 15th centuries, such as egg tempera on wood and parchment, so exemplarily explained by Cennini in his "Treatise on Painting." Camiletti's art is rather unique for our hasty and superficial times; an artistic practice that goes against the grain, based on slow and ancient rituals, patient layers of color and subtle glazes executed with pigments often drawn from nature to represent nature in all its forms.

Although in recent years he has specialized as an "Animalier," he does not disdain portraits, landscapes, and still lives, often executing them on commission.