Interview with Mauro Palmieri- The Right Angle Project

1.   How did you come up with idea for a month long portrait marathon to raise funds for charity?

The idea of the month long marathon of portraits was born over a coffee with my mother, the internationally acclaimed artist, ‘Anna Minardo’, last year in early October. She needed an inspiring project to get her motivated and I suggested she perform a marathon of portraits over a period of 30 days, where participants would pay a fraction of the cost of a commissioned portrait and 50% of the takings would be donated to a charity. In those 30 days, Anna painted 184 oil portraits, raising $22,000 for ‘Charity Works’ which is an organisation dedicated to the research of MS. From that event, ‘The Right Angle Project’ was born, named after our Chapel street art studio, ‘Right Angle Studios’. The main focus of the project is to create work for artists, donate money to charity and allow people to have access to extremely affordable original artworks, whether they be portraits of themselves, loved ones or friends…..even family pets!

The second marathon event for The Right Angle Project will be my own, where during the months of July and August I will be shooting portraits of the participants and then applying my unique collage/décollage technique to create the final artworks.

Our aim is to reach between 100 – 200 participants, raising between $15,000 to $30,000 for my selected charity, the St.Kilda PCYC youth charity.

2. Are there any specific messages, you hope to convey through the portraits used in this project?

In the case of this project my focus is on creating individual artworks that suit both the character of my subjects and my own artistic interpretation of each person.

3. What ways do you hope that the funds raised through the project will assist the PCYC intercultural arts program?

The aim is to establish a new program for the St.Kilda PCYC, which will be dedicated to developing an arts program for youth who are from disadvantaged environments and backgrounds, where they don’t have access to facilities or support for the development of there creativity. The funds will help us to establish the foundations of this program. Our goal is to nurture the skills of these young people in various areas of the arts e.g. painting, drawing, photography, music and dance.

4. Is there anything in particular which is inspiring your most recent work?

I am inspired by old torn posters on the street, fascinated by the tensions between the constant output of advertising and the passage of time. My photographs are ripped and torn, sanded and painted, white washed and assembled and adhered to boards.

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