Join us for a reception to celebrate artist Dan Petrov's show Poetry of Paintings. Petrov's oil paintings will be on display in the library gallery November-December 2024. 

Artist Statement:

"My interest in oil painting formed very early with the realization that painting simultaneously takes me in three different directions: into the world, in the painting process and in the introspective process. It became obvious that technical skills of observation and application were paramount for visual expression and that is the reason that my painting practice was deeply rooted in Renaissance and Flemish Oil Painting Method combined with some contemporary aspects of Direct Painting Method. Realism is still the most productive way of conveying the ideas, demonstrates the highest respect to the viewer and provides clarity of articulation of visual language. My daughter Mia explained that in her school as a five year old, “my dad paints things that look like things and people that look like people”. In Still Life genre objects are not just the forms that receives the light. These paintings are conveying our existential relation to the nature and production that is in function of our sustenance and life. It also elevates our perception from mundane and ordinary to the level of beauty. If we think about still life painting as a tool of transcendence of daily life, we cultivate higher experience of reality. In genres of portrait and figure I am interested to explore aspects of human condition, individuality, character, themes and feelings of impermanence, loss, grief, uncertainty and choices that are optimistic beyond the shallow feeling of happiness and directed to the meaning of individual and collective."