"Violet No.16" Painting

The lush, layered and boldly energetic paintings of Ivo Stoyanov have been admired and collected in the United States, Canada, Japan, the United Kingdom, China, United Arab Emirates, Bulgaria and Spain. Stoyanov studied Mural Painting in the Academy of Fine Arts in Sofia, Bulgaria and he has been recipient of numerous prestigious grants and mural commissions. “My paintings are meditative work, inspired by the fragility and beauty of natural forms and attempt to reclaim the experience of outdoors in my Toronto studio. The working process focuses on applying layers of various colors and textures over incised and drawn marks, looking for both a spontaneous and informed image – that place where surprise and intention meet.I am using a combination of acrylic paint mediums, marble dust, pigments and cold wax medium, resulting in a satin surface, rich with visual texture, original mood and energy.” “Some artists strive to involve their audience in a relationship that is more intimate than vision alone permits. Ivo Stoyanov coaxes our eyes and heads into that transcendental place, a simultaneously light and dark place, where he firmly believes that art, and especially art about the natural world, shakes hands with spirit. His extreme reduction to visual and pictorial essentials is responsible for that magical quality we can discern so clearly as negative space, an ideal notion to capture the essence of what makes a Stoyanov image so mesmerizing. It is the essence of absence. And the breath of the mind is what it takes away, submitting us to the silence of seeing.” - Donald Brackett