When I am asked what I do, my answer is: “I am an artist, I paint pictures.” The next questions they always ask are about the style of my paintings and the things I paint – landscapes, flowers, or portraits … Well, every artist would agree with me that there are no simple answers to those questions.
As a young artist, I was told that I was supposed to find my own style … Even then, I didn’t understand that and it sounded odd to me. Many years have passed, and I still don’t understand it. In my opinion, style is a “label”, or more precisely, a framework where you put yourself in, or where someone else puts you in. For me personally, to paint the same way in the course of decades is a self-imposed constraint. And I believe that this is so, because an artist evolves and changes all the time. Man’s creative spirit is restless, and it gets excited at different times by different themes. One explores new means of expression, by which one could objectify one’s ideas.
For some time, I was inspired to re-create on canvas the colors, music, and rhythm of the rich Bulgarian folklore. That is why, in many of my paintings, there are dances, hues, countryside traditions, etc. For instance, in my paintings called “Fairies”, apart from the mythical folk characters, the key element is the Bulgarian embroidery … While in “On the Wings of Love”, “January Feast”, and “The Window”, I seek to depict the whole cycle of life in some sort of mosaic – day and night, people in love, weddings and merrymaking, the table, the ring dance, musicians, hay-making, even graveyards, etc.
After seeing a heap of pumpkins, I created the series called “Abundance”, simply because an artist’s eye is quick to discover beauty and pictures everywhere – even where others pass it by unnoticed …
One of my many exhibitions, entitled “Fragrant Pictures” was inspired by a hand-made Tibetan paper with flowers, seeds, and parts of plants of various colors and textures. So, I created collages which I decorated with fragrant hand-made hangings.
And in my latest exhibition, entitled “Touch”, the paintings “I Feel Your Presence”, “I Will Sometimes Come In Your Dream”, and “Summer Night” could be described as modernist, postmodernist, or abstract. In “I Love You”, “Beside the Sun and the Wind”, “At My Soul’s Temple”, and “The Moon On Her Throne”, I have made a collage from hand woven lace in order to express my ideas.
That is why my pictures are so different, and, at a first glance, seem to have no definite, overall style. But what is more important than the technique is their essence, their spirit - the love, romance, and the passion for light and beauty. All of those are profound, innermost wishes we should all strive to have in our too busy and prosaic daily routines.
