Carla Gaudio’s new exhibition, Donna e Madre, exploring women and gender issues, is on view during November and December at Jonathan Edwards Winery in North Stonington. “Donna e Madre,” translated as “Woman and Mother,” focuses on an array of women’s issues, including motherhood, those who have lost parts of their bodies, and old age. Fifteen acrylic paintings are on view.
“My art is more on the landscape side...sometimes it’s still life or I juxtapose the two of them. I’ve done some abstraction but not much. Lately I’ve been really interested and intrigued by the figure. I know it’s not avant-garde in the art world, but it just fascinates me and speaks to me,” said Gaudio.
“Artistically speaking I am not a realist. Emotions and imagination are really at the base of what I do. I feel like a spastic puppy—I get excited about everything and like everything. I love all of the styles and have tried quite a few of them,” she added.
Gaudio’s focus on women’s issues started when she was reading stories about genocide and rape in Africa.
“There was one particular story that really touched me. It was this woman who was raped and got pregnant. She was mutilated and they amputated her legs. I was trying to picture this woman with a big belly and no legs. I was thinking, ‘My God, what a sight.’ I wondered how I or people would react to seeing that. It really caught my attention and my emotions.”
Then a friend of hers was diagnosed with cancer. Her boyfriend left her because she had a mastectomy.
“That really got me mad. I started making these paintings of women without arms, legs, and without a breast,” Gaudio said.
Motherhood, another issue in the show, changes a woman’s life and, at the same time, there is lots of love and tenderness involved, which Gaudio depicts in her paintings.
The show also focuses on women in nursing homes.
“What’s really at the base of what I’m doing is that there is no acceptance and love of what is not like us,” explains the artist.
What she calls her “old people project” is about “the despair, the loneliness, and the sadness of our life.”
“I know that the subject is frightfully difficult,” she admits. “People usually have this tendency of not wanting to see what we don’t like and what is ugly and not beautiful. We shy away from it and even hide it from our children. We put these people in places where they are hidden from society. It’s not a good teaching. We don’t teach our children to love everything that comes with being a human being. We value only what is beautiful, young, healthy, and strong. There is no place for weakness and ugliness.”
Donna e Madre, she says is “a hard subject and some people may not like it. It might be difficult to digest and if people don’t like it, it’s okay. I’m not anxious for anybody to like it, but I think they probably understand it.”
Portrait of the Artist
Gaudio started painting rather late in life. She grew up in the medieval city of Padua, Italy. As a child, she wanted to attend art school but her parents, neither of whom attended a university, told her that she would attend a technical high school and then wait for her “white knight in shining armor.”
So she came to the U.S.
“I came here and didn’t speak English. I built up my English knowledge and put myself through school,” Gaudio said.
At 34—with three children and a knight in shining armor, cardiologist Dr. Jon Gaudio—she graduated from the University of Colorado with a Bachelor of Fine Arts.
“It didn’t take me four years, let’s put it that way,” she said.
Painting took a back burner, however, as Gaudio renovated the family’s first house and then a second, an 1850 farmhouse in Mystic. “That’s where I put my creative input for quite a few years. Now it’s been a couple of years, I’ve been back painting because the house is finished. I’m back to starting what I wanted to do. Same story—woman with kids.”
While all paintings in the show are acrylics, Gaudio is currently studying oil painting at the Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts in Old Lyme.
“That is my next goal,” she said. “I’d rather have people look at the picture and come up with their own interpretation. The beauty of looking at the picture is not being influenced by anything you know about the artist. The picture has got to speak to you by itself.”
By Susan Cornell
Special to the Times
Donna e Madre is on view Wednesday through Sunday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. during November and December. For more information, call the Jonathan Winery at 860-535-0202. Jonathan Edwards Winery is at 74 Chester Maine Road in North Stonington.