Post stroke, Italian painter connects with poet Dickinson

By CATHERINE BAUM Staff Writer

Published on August 01, 2008

Eighteen years ago, Easthampton artist Alberto Mancini had a cerebral hemorrhage that left him in a coma for six weeks. He suffered partial paralysis for two years and memory loss to the degree that he didn't know his own name. He has since fully recovered, and was able to express his awakening from that experience in the title of his upcoming exhibit, "I'll tell you how the Sun rose -" inspired in part on the works of 19th century poet Emily Dickinson.

The exhibit is especially meaningful to Mancini, who said his love for Dickinson's work came years ago after he awoke from his coma and found himself in what he describes a "personal psychological regression," in which he was trying to understand himself in relation with nature. He dedicated the exhibition to his only child, his son Jacopo Mancini, 19, who lives in Italy and attends the University of Perujia. The artist will reunite with his son this fall, when he moves back to Italy for three months before coming back to Easthampton.

The show, presented by The Emily Dickinson International Society with The Emily Dickinson Museum, is 29 oil paintings that he created based on the poems of Emily Dickinson. They will be displayed at Amherst College's Eli Marsh Gallery, 105 Fayerweather Hall, starting Saturday and running through Aug. 10, with the opening reception Saturday from 4:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m.

"Scenes of transfiguration proliferate in Mancini's paintings, impressing us with the luminous, shimmering pulse of vital energies that we have come to know in different ways through Dickinson's poems," said Paul Crumbley, president of the society. Crumbley, associate professor of English and American studies at Utah State University, is one of many Emily Dickinson scholars who meet once a year for EDIS's annual meeting. The meeting place varies throughout the world, but this year - the 20th anniversary of the society's annual meetings- the organization will meet in Amherst (see related story).

"He gives us her sunsets, flowers and butterflies recast according to the terms of his own artistic vision," said Crumbley. "Even the most dedicated student of Dickinson will see her work in new light as a consequence of viewing the 29 paintings."

An Italian artist who lives in both Easthampton and Italy, Mancini, 47, painted these pieces when he was living in Sarasota, Fla., and has kept them in storage for two years. He said he wanted the paintings to be seen first in Amherst, the Dickinson's hometown. Coincidentally, Mancini was born not too far from here in Newton, where he spent the first four years of his life before his parents moved back to Italy.

Mancini has always been fond of nature, as it grabbed his attention when he painted while growing up in Atina, a small mountain town in southern Italy where generations of his family have lived for 400 years.

Mancini's father, Flavio Mancini, taught Mancini between the ages of 8 and 12 how to use fabrics, oil and water colors and tree leaves and branches to create drawings, paintings or collages in sessions in their home almost every evening. Flavio Mancini, a portrait photographer, inspired his son to draw and, in doing so, passed on his curiosity and appreciation of nature, Mancini said. "He's a force of life; now he's 74 and he's much more alive than myself," Mancini said of his father. "We cannot stop him."

"My father was able to play with everything," Mancini said recently during an interview in his Eastworks art studio on Pleasant Street in Easthampton. His cat, Micia, which is Italian for "kitty," walked about the studio's maple wood floors. Natural light shone through 10-foot high windows and into the spacious room, which holds fresh flowers, tables and chairs and 25 feet of wall space filled with his paintings, some of which he painted this summer and others that were completed a dozen years ago. There is also a kitchen space where Mancini cooks pasta nearly every day for himself and his "dearest friend," as he puts it, Ann Black. Mancini divorced the mother of his son.

Mancini, who is also a practicing architect in Italy, consults his business partners and workers in Italy via Web camera daily, but he took a few hours off from that one morning to talk to a reporter about his exhibit and what led him to it.

Knowing Mancini's affinity for nature, his poet friend, Alfonso Cardamone, guided Mancini to a collection of Dickinson's poems.

"He said, Why don't you put your nose in Emily Dickinson poems?'" Mancini said.

Following his friend's advice, Mancini read a collection of Dickinson's poems. Later on, he found her full collection translated into Italian. He connected to them using his imagination, which is stored in what he calls his "big pot." Mancini believes the person he is today is rooted in experiences and thoughts created in childhood ages 1 to 10.

Emily Dickinson's words bring Mancini back to that earlier period in his life.

"It's very easy to build up a meaning because our brain has energy to make meaning," Mancini said.

Mancini recalls connections he made with nature as a child - from holding tree branches down to get a closer look at birds to spending every day exploring the woods with his friends to holding a bee in his hand, assuring it he would not hurt it and then letting it go. The flowers, the breeze and the clovers Dickinson wrote about are what Mancini wanted to work with.

When it came time to express his interpretation of her poetry in his images, Mancini meditated and concentrated on his imagination. Mancini painted on impulse, to a point, he said, that "seemed like somebody else was behind me" stroking the paintbrush for him.

"When I need images I have to go into my big pot," Mancini said. "You just go in your big pot and search. The process is much more important than the work."

This exhibit is the first Mancini's done working with poetry. It all happened because he was touched by the connection he made to words that were written more than 100 years ago from a place that is thousands of miles away from where he grew up.

"Poetry has no space, no time, no distances," Mancini said. "It's just there; it's just happens. The feelings, they come out. All of them go into this feeling of just one."

Following the August exhibit, Mancini will sell his paintings. Though he admits it "hurts" him to think they will be taken away, he said he wants them to communicate something to others.

"Anything an artist does must leave," Mancini said. "They must go around. They have to give the chance to be put into life."

Catherine Baum can be reached at cbaum@gazettenet.com.