EXPERIENTIAL FINE ART: PAINTING A PAINTING

I am an experientialist. The experience of painting - or living through several hours of life while painting - is that which is transformed into visual texts of my paintings. The more vitality in these hours the stronger the paintings are.

Vitality means wakefulness, when a whole day is welcoming and waiting for you in the morning, when the life is exquisite and all is connected with all: rain, coffee, lines, birds, sand, sounds, paints, hopes. All attributes and events of these several hours matter: the time of the day, the side of the house, pine needles falling on acrylic, the energy to love what you see, thoughts about yesterday, bare feet on the grass, all of the sounds you hear, the type of wind, sparkles, the webs of paint intertwining on canvas, how quickly the sun dries the paint - all of this is essential and is represented in the art. The energy of this several-hour-long life experience becomes the layers of colorful webs, spots and shapes, which are representative of all the layers of the experience.

My painting is completely connected to reality. It is straight, intense, and interacting with each and every nuance of the moment. It is an attempt to touch the miracle of life. You paint what you see, feel, and think about. It does not matter where you are and what surrounds you - people, things or landscapes. The most important is the experience of being there for a certain amount of time, sensing all that you sense, feeling it, thinking, acting and transforming the experience into the colors, textures and shapes of an artwork.

Experiential painting derives from modernism. It is specifically rooted in post-impressionism, abstract expressionism, lyrical abstraction, and new reality school. My biggest influence of all was, has been, and is Vincent Van Gogh and his unbelievable vitality and love of what he saw.

I love complexity and texture on canvas. People often say they want to touch the surface of my paintings. But even more than complex texture, I like contrasts: complex next to simple, delicate next to bold, hot hues of color next to cold ones, light next to darkness, primitive next to sophisticated, balance beside asymmetry, and so forth.

I love to paint on canvas laying on grass, sand, or anything we have beneath our feet. No easel, no brush - just lots of paint, flowing, splashing, producing meanings on the canvas. For me, brushes interfere, limit and distort the intimate relationship between paint and canvas, as well as the relationship between my experience and the resulting art. I want nothing getting in between the paint and canvas.