Composition 16 Painting

My name is Igor Khalandovskiy. I was born in Ukraine in the city of Kharkov. Since my school years I dreamed of becoming a professional artist. At that time I attended an Art School for Children. After I graduated from high school, I entered the Kharkov Art Academy, and spent seven years studying painting, drawing, art composition, graphic illustration, art and industrial design. I was one of the top students of my class, and several of my projects had won awards for the best art design at International Exhibitions. I graduated from Art University in 1991 with Master Degree in Fine Arts. From that time I have been worked as graphic artist and art designer. For the past nineteen years I have lived and worked in the United States. I have learned and mastered such fields as graphic design and digital animation. To improve my professional expertise in digital art media I entered Iowa State University. Now I am close to complete my second Master Degree in the fields of digital visualization and landscape architecture. For all these years I continued working as freelance artist (watercolor, tempera, acrylic, digital photo manipulation, 3d rendered art images). For the past four year I have been working as a teacher of the graphic art and design at Des Moines Area Community College (Ankeny Campus). My professional skills are unique because they combine strong academic art school and latest advances in digital graphic media. In my art I have always attempted to synthesize natural beauty of the world with uniqueness of my imagination. My earlier works are almost exclusively romantic and fairytale-like made by watercolor and tempera. Later I began utilizing more oil and acrylics as I continued painting on paper and canvas. In the most recent years I have combined digital art and photography to compliment my academic skills. In my art you will find a wide variety of media through which I express my vision of the world. In my art I attempted to express my individual perception of the surrounding world. My pictures are fusion (blend) of symbolism and surrealism. Such eclectic approach offers unique opportunity to represent life as dramatic duel between dreams and reality. Often my works are fantastical landscapes filled with internal collision. There I use features of antiquity, ancient Egypt, Assyria, Sumerian, Indian civilization.