Biography

ANCHISE PICCHI is a Tuscan artist. He was born in Crespina (Pisa) on March, the first, 1911 and lived and worked, very near, in Collesalvetti (Livorno, Italy) as a sculptor, painter, engraver and where he died on September, 13, 2007. He finished his course of studies at the Artistic High School and at the Belle Arti Academy in Rome, taught painting in Siena (Italy) and in Salonicco (Greece) during some years, but eventually decided to come back in his native land to devote himself entirely to the art, his real vocation.

He began exclusively as a sculptor (1947), carrying out clay plastics and wood carvings in the round and in relief; this activity has always been kept on alternatively. Later he proceeded to the oil painting, exercising also fresco, pastel, watercolor, and etching. For the initial and sequential activity he is therefore author of many sculptures, in walnut, bronze and chalk, executed in a classical spirit and high relief. Very accurate are the portraits of friend artists like the one of painter Pietro Annigoni and the speaking one of Renato Natali. In the wood, characterized from chiseling caressing the surfaces that shape figures and objects on landscape in basrelief, it is remarkable unusual manifold depths of plains, as in two beautiful lunettes "The musician Putti" and the "Vintager Putti".

The paintings of the initial period are characterized by an impressionistic style in landscape scenes: this is the first manner. These are painted with wide brush strokes of pure colors. There are represented mainly stormy skies, domestic animals, scenes of work with backlight figures, country roads, fires in the open, farmhouses, sea storms, rain effects with people under large colored umbrellas, snowfalls, fog's scenes. All works, painted in the studio or in the open air, show nature love and lyric feelings.

Later the works are carried out in a style completely new and called the second manner by himself. He represents now, besides the usual subjects, some themes with strong symbolic contents in the numerous still life inserted in fantastic landscapes with high light contrast.

During the year 1978, on April, there was shown in Palazzo Strozzi, in Florence, a Anthological Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture under the sponsorship of the Municipality and the Tourism Office, with great success of people. Some of the works here shown were already in that important exhibition. Others new and more recent have been added diversifying, where necessary, for technique.

The CD-ROM shows the almost complete artworks set.

Lately, A. Picchi also exercised himself with a new manner, called third, and with the pyrographic and electronic painting. Typical are some paintings carried out with a PC IBM/VP 6384 DX4 100 Mhertz with the simple "Paintbrush" of Windows 3.1. With this technique, fog scenes come out well enough as the gray is the color that less goes away from the intentions of the author, in the following printing process. Now the artist works with more complex painting softwares like "Fractal Design Painter" that allows a larger variety of colors and tonalities.

Thus also in the dry technical virtual world, the figures and the scenes carried out reflect the great love of the artist for the surroundings, the dreams, the life. In short, the love for poetry, which doesn't know his beginning and purpose but which can spring up even from a computer if midwives by the mind and the imagination of human beings.