Lucca Animation

Ursula Ferrara is born in Pisa on May the 28th, 1961. As a child she gets fascinated by the arts world thanks to her parents' influence. Her mother is, in fact, a painter and sculptress and her father, albeit a man of science, is an excellent photographer. She loves especially photography and drawing and, when she's 18 she enrols to the Art Institute in Florence: she studies graphic design and photography and also art history, which will have a constance presence in her following works. No animation courses were available, back then, yet Ursula decides to try and join her greatest passions, drawing and photography, in animation. Her debut work Lucidi Folli depicts no characters, but rather a single line in a continuous metamorphosis.

In her second work, Congiuntivo Futuro, the focus shifts onto metamorphosis movement, the passage from a drawing to the next one; the pictures start to get a more three-dimensional  aspect thanks to the introduction of shading on the bodies. Two years later, another black and white film, Amore Asimmetrico, in which she represents the carnal and sentimental love and gives movement and sensuality to images inspired by contemporary  art. Her last black and white film is Come persone, where she continues her analysis of human relations with a series of 1600 drawings that, just like thoughts, uninterruptedly flow in front of our eyes.

The following film, Quasi niente, is some kind of a breakthrough, as the animator abandons the linear graphite to indulge in more mellow oil painting; what Ursula Ferrara is actually doing is to follow the academic path of learning, where pencil is the very beginning, followed by monochrome chiaroscuro and finally colouring. Later on, animation adds to the pictorial components time and sound, making it possible to represent, like in Cinque stanze, everyday life and trains of thought. Her following work, La partita, sees the personal thoughts of each character mesh with the other ones, with a play field as a metaphor for life.

In News (2006), her latest work, the author goes one step further respect to moving paintings, and mixes several elements: painting, drawing, collage, watercolours, glue and others to represent fragments of the surrounding reality. In this eight films, spanning twenty years, the artist has put all of herself. Whether in the first works the main topics are sensual thoughts and dreamlikeworlds, in the following ones, reality emerges clearly, thanks to the painting mellowness; a constant style evolution to highlight the deepest meaning of contents. Ursula Ferrara's work is in continuous metamorphosis, following the natural passages from individuality to interpersonal relations, as well as from thoughts to reality.