Artist Statement

October 2009

I view my art as a visual diary of my life. To paint is my way of analysing and understanding the world.

My themes are always derived from everyday experiences and impressions. In my paintings I explore topics like movement, energy, contrast and the mystery of emotions. I am interested in how they interconnect into body language as the true expression of the individual.

For this reason I have always been drawn to painting the performing arts. For instance ballet, by far the most graceful of dances, is an art form which uses delicate beauty to tell dramatic stories of love, cruelty and passion. The dancers, who often appear almost fragile on stage, possess enormous physical strength and control.

In my Dancers and Circus Series I don't paint specific people. The figures symbolise the dancers, clowns and acrobats and the transformation they undergo on stage, the characters they embody. In these paintings I often use theatrical lighting even though I rarely define the stage. Painting with a knife, I use colour rather than line to create three-dimensional spaces and a sense of movement and light.

This technique is essential to all my oil paintings, including portraits. It allows me to determine directions, achieve complexity of colour and create textures which work with the form, all the while keeping the freedom in the painting and a uniform colour scheme. In my acrylic and tempera paintings I explore the balance between stylised forms, figures and objects, the continuation of their lines shaping a geometrical environment of a seemingly believable perspective.

Because I often work on more than one painting at a time, these concepts have now merged and I’m currently working on Cityscapes – a new series of oil paintings. The series will be a tribute to all the amazing cities I have lived in and visited, and the people living in them, who make them the unique and special places that they are.

Paola Minekov