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"Tonight is their Night" 2025 50" x 60" (127 cm x 152 cm) oil on canvas |
I have lived in a number of American cities under a variety of circumstances. I have lived in villages and towns in Bulgaria and the Netherlands and sojourned in places in between.
As the second of three daughters of immigrant parents (Austria and Bulgaria), I have been fortunate to have been raised in a family with threads of old country values and nostalgia blending with the American environment and energy to result in a unique weave. We grew up on stories and memories of faraway places and times but played kick ball on the street and played with the neighborhood kids. We dreamed of Austrian Alps and suffered family separations due to the Bulgarian communist regime.
When I lived in Bulgaria for nearly two years on the Fulbright Grant in 1996, I began to learn the language for the first time, faced old ghosts and began to collect my own encounters with people, the nature and the daily life. I pickled and canned food, searched for wild mushrooms and herbs, made soap, sang songs, drew in monasteries and churches, crocheted with wrinkled babas and mingled with shepherds on the fields. I watched and incessantly gathered. I explored themes of folklore and studied Byzantine wall paintings.
My internal world grew more colorful.
Have a further look and click on links in blue within this post, such as Touching Fate and All the Remembered Glory
You can also click on the links listed in the column to the right of the blog post.
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at my show at De Schakel in Wijchen, NL Photo courtesy: Andrea ten Hag |
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Exploring and developing ideas for narrative paintings, I made works on paper, such as :
Feasts of Fish and Medleys of Peculiarity, Part 1
Under the Village Life (Arbanassi)
Now, in the Netherlands, I am not partaking in fish dinners on the Danube or going on wild boar hunts, but I am gathering the light, the sky, and trying to find my connections. Again, I am an outsider transplanted. I want this world to tangibly relate to what I can understand.
As a painter, just as in life, I respond to the feeling of something, the sense of a place, the impression of a circumstance. I am interested in exploring the touch, the mark, the way a story unfolds as the painting is made.
I am currently working with the figure, finding a way to incorporate stories and memories using imagery gathered and developed along the way.
I continue to explore ideas in my drawings of Gatherings, such as: The Gatherings, Part 1
and in a series I call, A Dance in Time: A Dance in Time, Part 2
I am investigating the richness of who we are as humans, the sense of family, our human history, and our connections to those around us, now, before and thereafter.
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"The Long Way Back", 2025 50" x 60" (127 cm x 152 cm) oil on canvas |
