art: martina sciolino

SCIOLINO

A RTIST M ARTINA S CIOLINO

b l u rs l i n e b e t we e n

ART & POP CULTURE STORY AND PHOTOS BY VALERIE WELLS

40 • south mississippi scene

 An eBay shopping addiction inspired
Martina Sciolino to start painting large
pictures of toys.
Searching for vintage clothes online
one day, Sciolino came across thou-
sands of images of vintage toys. What
really sparked her imagination were
plastic dolls and figures from the early
20th Century. She couldn’t take her
eyes off the images.
“There’s childlike play and a little
bit of gothic,” she said.
Her large oil paintings capture the
childlike yet gothic characters. The
images fill her Parkhaven home in
Hattiesburg, peeking around corners in
the hallway. Big eyes in round
faces in a background of bright
colors look out on her studio.
Sciolino is a multi-talented
renaissance woman. She is an
English professor at the
University of Southern
Mississippi who also sings jazz
with a band on the weekends.
She trained as a dancer when
she was a teenager.
And now she paints.
She likes the intensity and
texture of oil paints. It captures
the pop-culture sensibility of
the vintage dolls. She considers
her work part of a contempo-
rary genre called pop surreal-
ism. The shapes and faces aren’t
too different from anime and
magna characters imported from
Japan.
Not all the dolls are cute and
quaint. That appeals to Sciolino.
“They are strange, macabre
and slightly offensive,” she
admits.
A year ago, she wanted to
explore her artistic fascination
with these pop-culture toys. She
went to a sculpture workshop in
Vermont. When she got back to
Hattiesburg, she decided paint-
ing was something she could do
in the home easier.
Art exhibits in New York,
Philadelphia and Nashville all
contributed to Sciolino’s visions.
Contemporary artist Takashi
Murakami influences her style
in blurring the line between art
and pop culture. Other
artists she admires include
abstract expressionists Jackson
Pollack and Willem de Kooning
and quirky portrait artist
Francis Bacon.
The literature professor and
writing teacher describes her
work as non-narrative.
“I like the figures to exist in
space. There’s an absence of
content. I take things out of
their normal context,” she said.
“This is where my ambition
meets my interests and ability.
It’s a balance between the intel-
lectual and the physical.”
south mississippi scene • 43