Betti Iannucci

Hello,
Glad to be part of this course. My name is Betti, I am a born and raised Italian, I have been living in New York for about 15 years and my profession is creative director for retail fashion, beauty and life-style brands. I studied Graphic Design in London, even thought my real desire was to do fine arts. Unfortunately my style at the time did not appeal to the fine art college I applied to and ended up studying graphic arts.
I love art, I find art and creativity is a life force in everyone of us, it comes naturally to create, to do and to make things. I have many inspirations and role models. There are countless of artists that have inspired me, in my recent years I have been especially drawn to Ed Ruscha, Donald Judd, Mark Rothko, Picasso … it’s something about the visual and conceptual quality of their work that resonates with me. I am kind of unique in my family, in the sense that I chose to make art a career, some of my relatives, even my father, did engage with painting as amateur, painting flowers, portraits. So I was lucky to always have people around me that had walls full of self made art, which I think helped me to cross and bridge and make art myself when I was inspired to. I had always drawn a lot, I remember my drawing to evolve from squabbles to more geometric shape, until my shapes became abstract representations of things, people, landscapes. I started painting in my teens, and experimenting with different colors and techniques, until time came to decide what I wanted to do as a profession and my decision to study art didn’t agree with my father idea of a career. Don’t blame him, we were living in Sardinia, they did not have an idea about the world in its grandiosity and they had pretty conformist ideas about what they wanted their children to be. Teachers, nurses, doctors, lawyers, accountants. Art was not in the pictures really. So with the right information and the guts that I seem to have been born with I took my talent, drawings, paintings, to London and I started building my life. As an independent individual and person. I ended up graduating in the graphic arts in London and I landed a job in Milan basically before I graduated.
Since then a lot has happened, it was 1995. Since then I worked my way up as art director, opened and closed a design studio in Milan, moved to New York to work with an agency, moved up more steps to work as a creative leader for corporate brands and now I am falling flat on my face holding a Covid Related job termination in one hand and a big question in the other: now what?
Well, I am almost 53, I have done a ton of work, I have a lot of experience, do I want to keep doing a job that has become sterile and devoid of creative meaning or do I want to take some more challenging? What gives me the most joy in life is to do art, to create and I would love to translate that into something that also can sustain my life style. I can do it together or with people, I think every creative endeavor involves both situations. I am very good in doing art and not sharing, it lives fantastically in my head but now I want to put it out there. If money would not be an issue I’d do exactly what I am doing. I have a few projects that through the years have grown in my fantasy and now I feel the time is ripe to manifest them.