Watching you watching me

When we moved into a new house we were thinking of getting rid of two old useless shrubs on our backyard. We were very unimpressed, until in a month time they suddenly exploded with fabulous violet flowers. These were tibouchina trees. One morning there came a white cockatoo. We watched him, he watched us back. I painted a colourful memory of the encounter.

Follow

I am not an artist of one painting style. I like to experiment and explore the art landscape. This is probably definitely complicating my reputation as an artist in gallerists’ eyes, but attracts many different people who look for creative diversity, flexibility and fluidity within one artist. I do not want to die wondering how my art would look like if I were an abstract expressionist. I want to try it, do it, celebrate life as I see it and express myself in more ways than just one.

While always staying true to my favourite subjects such as floral still life, birds, female portraits and occasional landscapes, I utilize elements of a few styles to add interest and a contemporary twist to a painting to create something original and exciting.

In my figurative artworks, I often fill nearly realistic shapes with emotions of certain chosen colours. I also like the intuitiveness and freedom abstract art offers and adore both the pure forms , ‘a form filtered to its essentials’ (Matisse), and conciseness of minimalism and maximalism of colourful expressionist abstracts.

I began to draw and paint when I was a child and finished high school with a formal qualification and certificate allowing me to work as a Graphic Design artist. But it didn’t happen. I got my Master’s Degree in Engineering instead and then worked as an engineer & research scientist and in technical Sales & Marketing.

I have always been interested in art. When I picked up brushes for real, sometime after moving to Sydney, I felt like I never ceased to paint. It took me a few years, many workshops and classes with the best Australian artists to realize that it was time to go on my own journey.

I would call myself an Australian Colourist, an artist who prefers bold, vivid colours. I don’t see the world through dark tinted sunglasses. I would rather exaggerate a colour than imitate greyed muted colour and use the colour that works than the colour that’s ‘really there’. But the truth is I like all the colours to paint with, including the polar opposites, those on a bright Matisse’s palette and neutral pastel hues. I can use only neutral tones if they describe the theme and emotions of the painting better. I believe that our relationship with colours works both ways. They influence our feelings and, the other way around, our mood or personality dictates what colours we dislike, love or choose.

As “an explorer” I will continue to mix and shake popular painting styles in my never-ending and almost impossible quest to discover a new unknown style I can put my fingerprints on.