For three years, Laura Ottina of the blog Animalarium has brought me joy with her weekly feature on Italian illustrator Franco Matticchio (b. 1957).
Repeating the intro from her inaugural post:I want to start this new blog about animals and artists with a post about a friend of mine who also happens to be one of my favorite Italian illustrators: Franco Matticchio. His drawings are witty, elegant and full of fantasy; sometimes dark, often enigmatic, always very personal. Animals are consistent inhabitants of Matticchio's unpredictable and humorous universe. Notably, an eyepatch-wearing cat called Jones is the protagonist of a series of surreal comics stories collected in the volume Sensa Senso, while a lonely bull terrier features in the animated title sequence for Roberto Benigni's movie "Il Mostro".
I asked Laura and Matticchio if I could feature some of these 150+ images, and to my delight Matticchio scanned even more of his work just for this post. Here are a bunch of my favorites.
The joys of blogging = something like this appearing in your inbox.