I have often influenced myself by the effects that offer image processing software. So, from my first use of Photoshop, I was marked by the Inner Glow filter. It corresponds to my main inspiration: the light. This is what attracts me in the new media: the RGB colors, the brightness and the contrasts produced by the screens.

When asked how color crosses different mediums, I like to explore the process of materialization/dematerialization of drawing. As a result, Inner Glow is a series representing the changes that my work underwent following my residency in Vence (Nice) in 2019 – 2020. This is one of my researches exploring the intersection between digital mage and drawing.



Inner Glow

Digital paintings created with my smartphone on the French Riviera.

#cotedazur

It is a series of small format paintings inspired by my memories of the French Riviera. These are shapes and colors that I observed: reflections and give way.
I changed my usual formats to explore the impact of scaling up my work. So I wanted to give materiality to my digital images. So I printed them and I transcribed them into painting. I painted prima vista, all at once in order to transcribe the transparency of the colors we see on the screen. Which ultimately resulted in completely different works.

French Riviera landscapes

It is a series that I made in my temporary studio in the Vallée, Brussels.
One of my colleagues was giving wooden boards, dyed blue. I took some to explore the possibilities of the material. So I started to recolors: blue and the color of produce the forms that I had discovered in my digital images. I dug the wood with my cutter in order to play with the twothe wood underneath. The series represents a roundup that I had photographed with my phone in a fountain in Vence (Côte d'Azur). I painted these photos in the Sketch app on my phone. Then it became a motif, an autonomous form. So I transcribed it through different media.

Woodcut reflections

Melancholic circles  is a series of paintings that I started after a stay in Ardeche (France). Back to Paris, I reviewed Lars von Triers movie Melancholia. Then, I decided to reproduce this state of being of an absolute destabilization.

Arriving a Vence, I continued the series in my new studio, The Sainte-Bernadette Chapelle. This building, located in the backyard of a retirement home, had a cold room next to my workspace. And since there was no water point in the workshop, I had to wash my brushes in the morgue. This neighborhood with death influenced my work. My paintings have become end-of-the-world landscapes.

Melancholic circles

Everything started, one evening in Vence (French Riviera), when I took a picture of a reflection in a fountain.
Then, I worked this form with Sketch (application on my phone). I drew on it, I mixed it with pictures of my paintings then, I was surprised by this white spot like a puddle.
It was an almost organic form. For me it symbolized Vence. And I told myself that here it was, that was my idea of ​Vence.
Then I printed my smartphone​ paintings and used them to paint this collection.

Vence

Drawings made during the living model sessions that I organize in my studio.

Denitsa Ilcheva