Luigi Lomanto Biography
He was born in Milan in 1924 to parents of southern origins, who moved with their families to Northern Italy for different reasons, origins that the Artist never denied but, indeed, on several occasions defended and claimed with passion and firm conviction. Reasons of opportunity, dictated by contingent economic difficulties, lead the family to direct the eldest son towards short and practical studies, unfortunately extraneous and very far from his true nature, without any consideration for his evident propensity towards artistic and creative activity . His passion for painting, however, had the opportunity to re-emerge and assert itself almost forcefully around the age of twenty, after the dramatic experience of the last war lived first at the front and then in the Bergamo mountains with the partisans. His first self-taught works date back to 1948 and are strongly influenced by his long stay in the mountains, with the partisans, in almost physical contact with the earth, animals, trees, sunrises and sunsets, as well as some of his adventurous and dangerous experiences as a mining technician in Val Gandino, in the Bergamo area. He writes in one of his essays: “Creativity or self-expression is the most fundamental need for man as soon as the primary needs of physical life are overcome”.
