Sable Books is excited to host a raffle for Francesco Lombardo’s Querencia II — an original water color and ink artwork on handmade paper.
Enter for a chance to win the art behind the cover for The Ending Hasn’t Happened Yet.
This offer is now closed. Thank you to all participants!
This painting comes framed by the artist and delivered with museum-quality packing. A limited number of $20 raffle tickets, capped at 125, will be sold. The piece was gallery-priced at $3800. Proceeds will benefit Sable Books, a 501(c)(3) non-profit.
How it Works
The top half of these tickets will be delivered to NC Poet Laureate Jaki Shelton Green. Sable Books will log your information on a bottom ticket, and send you your ticket number. The ticket pairs will be held in separate locations for the duration of the raffle.
Jaki drew the winning number live on Zoom (April 6th, 2022).
Raffle Closed
This raffle is now complete.
Thank you to all who entered. Your support is important to the continuation of our mission.
Congratulations to our lucky winner!
Artist Francesco Lombardo, on this piece:
“The experience of being is something we are only briefly able to sustain – a momentary illumination that is felt as our existing here and now, and experienced as seeing with a new clarity that is a truth outside measurement.
This truth outside measurement acts like a kind of oracle, giving us insight that is valuable to the degree it has nothing to do with careful calculation. In my drawings I depict a kind of sibyl, and I try to reveal some of this truth in the way I present the image of the sibyl as partially unknowable, existing in a state of flux. My goal here is to reveal us as unknowable, and in that sense get us closer to the experiencing of us as we truly are. This can seem like a contradiction, but it’s my attempt to differentiate between two words that have become conflated: truth and correct. Something is as correct as it can be measured and calculated, but as useful as that formula is it should never be understood as “truth”. Truth is the experience of being, and being is not reducible to the weight of a sculpture or width of a canvas, it is the occurrence of a kind of strife the artwork creates as it’s novel perspective allows for new understandings of reality to generate in the viewer.
I titled this series Querencia because the word struck home with me. It is a place where one feels safe, where strength can be drawn, where one feels most authentic. In my creation of this series I was trying to convey some of that feeling in the experiencing of truth, while at the same time building up my own sense of querencia.”
Francesco Lombardo’s paintings have been on display at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. as part of the 2010 Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition. Lombardo’s portrait “Monique” was featured in the publication Art in America (2011-2012 annual gallery/museum guide). Lombardo completed training in art from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. Shortly thereafter he studied with the painter Odd Nerdrum in Norway. In 2004 he found long-lasting influence in the otherworldly allure of Iceland after being awarded a Fulbright to study there for one year. Francesco Lombardo creates work that involves repetition, movement, and layers of translucent form. His artistic influences from the past are rooted in the linear elegance of the High Renaissance, the serene yet compelling postures of classical sculpture, and the folds within folds of Baroque art.
Color blindness is a complication that Lombardo must take into account when painting. His eyes struggle to discern various reds and greens but are compensated in this deficiency by an advanced ability to discern value (light and dark.) He does not want the issue of color blindness to have much, if any, impact on how his work is regarded. The choice to value an aesthetic defined more by complex spatial interactions and movement rather than application of hue has little to do with genetics, and the partiality towards design, subject matter, and aesthetics in general have been guiding factors themselves more than they have been reactive to problems caused by color blindness.