Neolithic (since 2015)

There are painters who paint in the same style their entire lives; up until now I belonged to those who continously surprised with something new. Yet in the year 2015 I fell back on something I had outgrown long ago, on concepts of my “stoneperiod”.

Over the decades my themes and paintingstyle kept changing. The path led from a figurative fantastic realism to an almost abstract, process-like creative flow. The early metaphors explored existential human conditions, the later ones showed “basic planetary patterns” and “living spaces”.

But in the last years “my artistic development didn’t develop anymore”. I had entangled myself in a tight mesh of painterly structures. This culminated in a process of accumulation of dots and curved lines, that went beyond any conceptual scope and consequently spread out onto the walls of my studio.

This mode of expression turned out to be an endless venture, a manic turning in circles within the “morphogenetic space” created by the motions of my painting hand. Did I get stuck in one and the same picture which is never finished?

As I was seeking for a way out, for a re-focussing of my work, my assistant Mimi Staneva supported me as a muse. She turned my attention back to the “stoneuniverse” and inspired me to paint “stoneimages” again. Together we reconstructed an awkward looking “stoneman” on canvas. Soon in the following paintings he resurrected in his original power.

The new works have a different painterly quality than the old ones, their application of color becoming more dynamic and the overall impression being more expressive. To my joy it turned out that the theme is still capable of development and can show further aspects of “being stone”.

The revival of the “stoneperiod” finds additional expression in paintings I create together with Mimi Staneva, in which her realistic self-representation is embedded in the world of the “stoneman”. The result is a fascinating symbiosis of two very different painting styles.