Couch Potato Painting

Zdenek Sopousek I was born and raised in Prague, Czech Republic, and have lived in Norway since 1982. I received my main artistic education at Christiania Friakademi in Oslo during 2002 and 2007 under the supervision of Jan Cato Bøttger. I have since participated in several separate and collective exhibitions in Norway (Oslo), England, Luxembourg, and Germany (Leipzig). I work with oil painting on canvas, mixed media oil painting, and photo collage. My inspiration comes from nature's variety of organisms, forms and shapes, and animalism. From this, I create an intimate universe that I call “Underground Nature”. Joining this world is important for my expression and telling the story through my art. My colorful OIL PAINTINGS are not purely figurative and yet, they are built on classical grammatical principles. I stretch the canvas on my own and use 100% pure linen or cotton which I prepare with different materials. I use pure pigments of high quality which I grind along with pure cold-pressed linseed oil. The actual painting process starts by covering the entire canvas with different color combinations and multiple layers of paint. In this way, the actual painting begins to take form. In MIXED MEDIA OIL PAINTINGS, I combine oil painting with photography on canvas. I print different photographic elements onto the canvas and merge them with oil paint to develop the pictorial expression. This is a fusion between Oil Painting and Photo Collage. My PHOTO COLLAGES are based on macro photography of nature. The work implies digital processing, transformation, and a combination of these images. The process is very similar to Oil Painting or Mixed Media Oil Painting when it comes to transparent layers and combining organics elements. Photo Collages are printed as high-quality Giclee prints on Hahnemühle Photo Rag 308 g / m2 with a little texture. The result is a high-resolution fine art print with impeccable colors and finely tuned sharpness. These limited editions are all signed and numbered by me. ART PRINTS OF PAINTINGS are fine art quality reproductions, the so-called Giclee prints, of my oil paintings. Independent of the original size, I use a scan to reproduce my paintings for art printing. In this way, I achieve the best quality. Giclee prints are high-resolution prints with impeccable colors and finely tuned sharpness. They are printed on Hahnemühle Photo Rag 308 g / m2 with a little texture.