THE ARTIST AS A CLOSE AND OPEN SYSTEM

The art of each artist is built upon three bases - his inner potential, the accumulations prior to him and the environment around him. My development as an artist realized in the years, when the access to the world art was too restricted, because of the political, economic and cultural reticence in Bulgaria. Probably just for that reason, each of the detected albums with reproductions turned into idol, whose studying in details constantly influenced my art. I became proficient from Chagall, Cezanne, Picasso while academism was studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Sofia. This indirect connection with the modern art yielded the skeleton on which I built my art. Dozens of sketches and notebooks have kept my notes, showing the scientific researches of Cezanne, Picasso, Arshile Gorki and De Kooning. I rose through and within the albums. This "escape" salvaged me from the terrible communist reality.

Later, when I saw their works in the original, I did not change my attitude very much, but I confirmed my positions. I even lost the interest in museums, because they did not give me anything new as compared to my experience. I preferred the observations on the "living life" and its unexplainable influence, which was transferred in my art in one form or another. I registered these "external admixtures" practically like a side observer. This was markedly shown during my longer stay in New York in connection with the grant for 1995 from the Pollack-Krasner Found., Inc.. Obviously, the city exerted influence on me with its unusual architecture and breathless rhythm of life.

The pictures imperceptibly changed their shape and they became bigger, clearer and with more colors. Of course, when you look at the skyscrapers in New York, you can not paint a basket with three apples and a drapery, but you would rather paint two lines. Then, I was fascinated with the idea for this phenomenon, for which I have not thought up to now – in what way do the social conditions change the creative work, in what way does the public psychology influence the aesthetic ideal.

I am interested in this problem not only perfunctorily, but in its psychological dimensions. To what extend the artist is "closed" in the world of his plastic achievements and inventions and to what extend he is "opened" for the influences of life, whether he paints figured compositions or abstract pictures. Into the sphere of the abstraction, the problem is even more interesting, because it concerns to unconscious reactions of the individual. I am curious to understand why in my thoughts the crowd along the "Fifth Avenue" I see as a crowd of triangular symbols and they are frequent element of my pictures. If these symbols are symbols of our time? What is their content? Are these symbols different from the symbols of the predecessors and what is the difference? This is a series of questions, which require practical and theoretical analysis.

New York, 1998