PORTRAIT / FIGURATIVE NOMINEE

Conversation with the Artist is a project about duality of human nature. The inspiration came to me during a conversation with a guy at the opening of a show. The male portraits represent my interlocutor. The female one is a self portrait. Classical male and female sculptures were floating in my mind. Some are symbols representing my interlocutor, others represent me. Classical shadows are turning a random encounter into a mysterious narrative. The colors look like fire because inspiration looks like falling in love, it’s literally fire! I used a very contemporary element , the air pods in my ear to fix the time of the painting. The orange, the purple and the turquoise are ancient pigments and that’s the reason of the color choice. The orange is like minium, used since ancient times. The word ‘miniature’ comes from minium because the head letters in the manuscripts were often bright minium red. Purple was the color of the emperors in Ancient Rome. Cleopatra rolled from a purple carpet in front of Julius Cesar. Turquoise was named Egyptian blue by the Romans because they imported it from Egypt. The turquoise is my color, because of the color of my eyes, so it outlines the faces and the painting arm. It’s the color that ties all elements together.