Francesco Clemente (born in Naples March 23, 1952) is an Italian and American contemporary artist. Influenced by thinkers as diverse as Gregory Bateson, William Blake, Allen Ginsberg, and J Krishnamurti, the art of Francesco Clemente is inclusive and nomadic, crossing many borders, intellectual and geographical. Dividing his time between New York and Varanasi, in India, he has adopted for his paintings a vast variety of supports and mediums, exploring, discarding, and returning to oil paint, watercolor, pastel, and printmaking. His work develops in a non linear mode, expanding and contracting in a fragmentary way, not defined by a style, but rather by his recording of the fluctuations of the self, as he experiences it. The goal is to embrace an expanded consciousness, and to witness, playfully, the survival of the ecstatic experience in a materialistic society.