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Although my personal work is abstract I was brought up
in Eastern Europe within the tradition of classical drawing
and figure painting. This means that I have a wide range
of styles at my disposal and can derive inspiration from
anything. In recent years my painting has been inspired
by Dante's great poem 'The Divine Comedy', with its sweeping
imagery and haunting visions, by Seamus Heaney's translation
of Beowulf and by poems of both John Keats and T S Eliot.
My response is not a literal one, but a general response
to the poem as a whole. Like any work of art these paintings
have to work both on a spiritual and a visual level; any
piece of art which does not will be condemned or discarded
within a very short time.
Any mature painter will have collected a variety of
influences, some conscious, others unconscious. I am
particularly aware of the colourful inheritance of Bulgarian
crafts and landscape painting, at the same time assimilating
the achievements of a range of abstract painters from
Kandinsky onwards. In the end, though, my work is a
result of the interaction between myself and the image
on the canvas, mediated by the range of techniques that
I have evolved.
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