catched in action

Emilio Vedova at work in his studio in Venice:

Emilio Vedova (August 9, 1919 − November 25, 2006) was an Italian modern painter, considered one of the most important to emerge in his country's artistic scene after World War II. Vedova was born in Venice into a working-class family. Between 1930 and 1935 the artist worked in a factory, for a photographer and restorer, as an artist he was mainly an autodidact. After an initial formative experience within Expressionism, he joined the group "Corrente" (1942-43), which included other artists such as Renato Guttuso and Renato Birolli. He participated in the Resistenza and played a key role in the post-war Italian art movement, which was opening up and contributing originally to the European avant-garde. His work exerted a significant influence on the Arte Povera group.

His formal experiment with un-consious and sensitive spreading colour on the irregular-shaped-like canvases must be recognise as a kind of action painting and meta-language's, self-reflexive statement about painting at all. It brings to consideration some resemblance with such artists like Jackson Pollock, Jasper Jones (Shaped Canvases) and the whole group of Geometric abstract artists, minimalists, and hard-edge painters, which elected to use the edges of the image to define the shape of the painting rather than accepting the rectangular format. But to define influence between abstract artist seem to be much more complicated than in figurative painting.

Jackson Pollock at work in his studio, NY 1920: