First it was music. I studied and enjoyed playing piano all through my youth. The transition from playing piano to transferring this inner music on canvas with oil paint happened much later in life.
I believe in strong connection between music and visual art. I want my art to be a visual music, where each brush stroke I make is infused with its own kind of melody. My hope is that the viewers will hear the sounds and rhythms of that music as they look at my work, and it will generate the same emotions that I had when painting that piece.
I am inspired by the way light shapes the landscape, and to capture it on canvas I often work en plein air. Painting en plein air, though very challenging due to unpredictability and varying conditions, helps me to capture the spirit and essence of a landscape by incorporating natural light, color and movement into my work. I use my plein air studies as a reference for my studio work.
My favorite starting point for the landscape painting is the golden light of late afternoon, known as the "magic hour", which creates the most intriguing effects by merging captivating shadow patterns and warm luminous color of the setting sun.
I choose to paint in oils because I love their robust buttery quality of bright, luminous colors, which are easily bendable and capable of retaining texture and showing brushstrokes. To add variety, I also paint gouache studies. I like their poster-like quality.
I think of my style of painting as an impressionistic realism, representational approach without photorealistic details. I am focusing more on the relations between light and color in the landscape.
I use a wide variety of brushes and palette knives depending on the need of a painting: from soft sable brushes to synthetic to bristle brushes. I use palette knives to create different textures: either to indicate a sharp edge, to blend colors, to smooth paint, or to build more paint layers.