Enrico Garff

Source Wikipedia

Enrico Garff (26 November 1939 - 1 September 2024) is an Italian portrait painter and colourist. Garff has worked as an artist in Positano, Sorrento, Rome, Sicily and in Sweden and Finland.

The Maestro was born in 1939 in Rome.
The Maestro Enrico Garff an Italian colorist pai...

Source Wikipedia

Enrico Garff (26 November 1939 - 1 September 2024) is an Italian portrait painter and colourist. Garff has worked as an artist in Positano, Sorrento, Rome, Sicily and in Sweden and Finland.

The Maestro was born in 1939 in Rome.
The Maestro Enrico Garff an Italian colorist painter of the 21st century.
Garff's works include oils, watercolours, acrylics, gouaches and paintings on silk. His favourite themes are humans, horses and mythology. His art can be found in the homes of many a lover of art and horses in Finland, in addition to some works displayed in public buildings. The artist's largest work in oils is seven metres wide. In Hufvudstadsbladet Helena Husman gives a thorough description of this painting ‘Sons of the Sun’ which is collocated at the Kamp Social Services Centre in Helsinki. This pictorial ode to mythology and joy is painted on five canvases and was inaugurated in 2003 together with the second portrait of President Martti Ahtisaari.[1] Opening speeches for this event were conducted by Ms Eeva Ahtisaari and by the artist's wife, Ms Isabella Diana Gripenberg.

Biography
Enrico Garff was born in Rome, Italy in 1939 as a true ‘figlio d’arte’. His father, Emilio Boffi, was an opera singer whose career, however, was impaired by his nervous disposition. His mother, Gertrud Garff, the daughter of a Swedish pharmacist, had arrived in Rome to study lyrical singing.[2] She had already managed to perform with the "King of Baritones", Mattia Battistini but her career too ended in tragedy as she lost her fine operatic voice virtually overnight.

Enrico Garff, an autodidact, started drawing at the age of six. From the very beginning he always regarded himself as a painter. "I have continued to paint and draw throughout my life. A picture should be a living entity and children are instinctively aware of this. The most important feature in depicting a horse is movement and in many classical music scores one can detect the tempo of the trot and the gallop."[3]

At the age of 19, Garff began to exhibit his oeuvres in collaboration with experienced artists in Via Massaciuccoli and Via Margutta where many of his works were immediately sold. Nevertheless, he resisted the temptation to make his art his sole profession. He continued his studies in humanities and in 1969 took his degree at the L'Orientale", Università degli Studi di Napoli "L'Orientale" and wrote his doctoral thesis on the Swedish poet Carl Snoilsky.

In 1970 Garff married the Finnish Baroness Isabella Diana Gripenberg who was the granddaughter of the poet Bertel Gripenberg. Isa Gripenberg, Isabella Diana's mother reported: "Shortly after my daughter Diana's arrival in Rome she and I participated in a party that had been arranged for young people. Suddenly a young man appeared who was so pleasant and handsome that I could not help the feeling in my heart that this man, who would be an ideal husband for Diana, could not possibly be single and unattached. A little later when I mentioned to the Italian speaking party that Diana wished to learn Italian from a specialized language teacher, a man answered, almost at once, in perfect Swedish that he occasionally gave private lessons. That man was the one I had noticed as he had entered the room earlier. He was Enrico Garff.[2]

Sorrento and Naples
Enrico and Diana went to live in Sorrento where their first son, Henrik Daniel and his sister Pamina Victoria, were born. Their second son, Beniamino Michele, was born in Rome in 1988. For seven years the artist supported his family as a language teacher at the university in Naples. However his energy enabled him to paint and exhibit many works in oils in Naples and Sorrento, in Frascati and even in Rome where his sole exhibition in the Saletta Marguttiana was inaugurated by the Swedish Ambassador to Italy.

Garff's exhibitions in Naples were well received by the newspaper Napoli Notte and by the magazine Eco d’arte moderna. Art critic Nino del Prete wrote that Garff's pallette was the chromatically richest one possibly could imagine.[4] In 1971 renowned art critic Paolo Ricci visited Garff's first sole exhibition in Naples and encouraged him by comparing his brush to that of Antonio Ligabue. In 1972 in an article in the summer supplement of the daily paper Il Messaggero, N. Nobiloni wrote that the oil painting, ‘Quercia Falconieri,’ which brought Enrico Garff the second prize of the ‘Concorso Internazionale di Pittura Italia 2000’, depicts a famous oak at the gate of Villa Falconieri in Frascati.[5] The words that Nobiloni uses when describing Garff's paintings such as "intense", "rich" and "violent" are very much the same description that seventeen years later, Federico Fellini's wife Giulietta Masina would write in the painter's guest book at the debut of the Gruppo Zuleika in Rome.[6]

Grottaferrata
Enrico Garff, "Venuto dal Cielo".jpg
In 1978, the painter rented a small house in Grottaferrata for his wife and children. In an article in the Finnish-Swedish magazine for culture, Astra, later Astra Nova, Dean Dixon's widow, Mary Mandelin Dixon pictures the rural life of the artist and his family in the little fairy tale house amongst figs, grapes and pink roses and bordering on a meadow from which there was a lovely view on Tusculum.[7] In this romantic place Garff, assisted by his spouse and mother in law, organized a special exhibition for Scandinavian tourists (June 1977) and he even sung Neapolitan songs to the visitors. With the money that this exhibition added to his income, a month later he financed the families move to Sweden. He left his post at the university, allowing himself the freedom to travel and to paint full-time.

Sweden
Enrico Garff, "Diana in Venice".jpg
This was the beginning of an odyssey that led the artist..