Video'd April 27, 2017 by artist and guest tolerance educator Akiva K. Segan
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The website of artist and guest tolerance educator A K Segan: www.humanrights-holocaust-art.org
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Note: This video can be viewed by viewers of all ages. The artist has guest taught children, with his Tolerance Education with Art power-point classes; frequently followed with his facilitating his Drawing-for-Healing art therapy - oriented workshop, with classes of school pupils ages 4 and up, older children, adolescents, and teens in schools in six U.S. states, and in England, Scotland and Wales. He has guest education majors (student teachers-in-training) at university classes in Illinois, England; guest taught teachers at a secondary school, Hod Ha’sharon, Israel; and has guest taught classes of M.A. Art Therapy students at the Arts Therapies program, Haifa University, Israel.
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About the artwork:
Under the Wings (art series) 64:
UTW 64: Stormy skies over Piedmont –
Homage to Italian anti-Fascist partisan Sandro Delmastro
Art: 2016
Media: Mosaic-drawing combo
Size: 51 inches H x 42 W [129.54 cm. H x 106.6 W]
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The drawing was begun April 17, 2016. I began w/ a light pencil sketch of Delmastro, a young Italian who was a chemistry studies classmate and a hiking buddy of Primo Levi. Both Levi and Delamastro hailed from Turin, in the northwest of Italy.
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The mosaic tile-making, beginning with the sky at upper left and right, and left and lower left, began on June 18, 2016.
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Segan did the drawing portrait from a photo of Delmastro seated on a rock ledge pinnacle high up and overlooking a valley. The photo may have been taken by Primo Levi on one of their hikes in mountains outside of Turin.
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Sometime between 1943 and 1945, during the years of the Nazi occupation of northern Italy and Mussolini’s last years in power, if truncated at that time, with the Republic of Saló, aka the Italian Social Republic (Italian: Repubblica Sociale Italiana), Delmastro, while attempting to escape from the Fascist Party house in the city of Cuneo* was shot in the back of the neck by "...a monstrous child-executioner, one of those wretched murderers of fifteen whom Mussolini's Republic of Saló recruited in the reformatories." (quote in the chapter 'Iron,' in The Periodic Table / by Primo Levi © Schocken Books, NY,1984; Il Sistema Periodico © Giuilio Einaudi editore SpA, Torino, 1975).
*Cuneo is a city in the Piedmont region, northwest Italy.
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Primo Levi, born in Turin in 1919, was an Italian Jewish chemist, anti-Fascist activist, an Auschwitz death-camp slave labor survivor, and after WWII, a world acclaimed author. He wrote of surviving Auschwitz and other Holocaust themed books. His other writing included poetry and even sci-fi.
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While Sandro Delmastro was not a victim of the Nazis (and thus not a Holocaust victim) he was a victim of murderous Fascism in Italy. As a pal of Primo Levi, I chose Delmastro as a subject for the tolerance education goals of the Under the Wings (and the companion Sight-seeing with Dignity human rights) art series.
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When Delmastro was 20 (I think and Levi were close in age) they went on a very ambitious and difficult mountain hike; among others. (Levi was born in 1919).
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The story of one particular hiking trip in the mountains was beautifully recounted by Levi in the chapter Iron in his book The Periodic Table (In Italian: Il sistema periodico).
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The drawing includes artified pencil sketches I drew of birds in W. Palm Beach, Florida (1991); and 2 plant sketches done on a hike to the Commonwealth Basin, Cascades mountains east of Seattle, Washington state (2009); 2 people seated at a dock at Greenlake, a park and lake in Seattle, 1992. Also in the drawing are artified ink drawings of the cliff side at the outside of the Big Four Ice Caves, Cascasdes mountains, east of Seattle (around 2001-2); and sheep, seagulls and a rocky cliff drawn during a coastal hike north of Newburgh, Scotland, 2015.
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The drawing of the horse was inspired by a color photo of a horse called an avelignese. Its origins are in Italy, as described on page 188 in the book The Encyclopedia of Horses & Ponies, edited by Tamsin Pickeral (Barnes & Noble, NY, 2003). An excellent reference book about horses, of which I knew little ‘til I began perusing the book, which I bought at a Goodwill store in Seattle in 2016.
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There is a rock at bottom center of the mosaic. I had picked it up on the beach in the small town of Bar, in Montenegro, Croatia, in 1985. A well-travelled rock! Its placement in the Delmastro mosaic is a spiritual return to Europe, which, sadly, is now, since 2015, give or take, is under grievous threat from a resurgence of far-right Fascism across the continent.
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Art, video © A. K. Segan

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