METROPOLIS, 2004 Painting

We have all heard the saying that something is as boring as "watching the paint dry." Well, I literally do that - I watch the paint dry. Watching the paint dry is the core of my painting technique. I am painter, art theorist, journalist born at 9:55 AM, January the 17th, 1969 in Ljubljana, Slovenia. This is all of my art production so far displayed in semi-chronological order. I try to maintain strict quality control so I have destroyed and still destroy more then I preserve. There are several video clips about my work available on my YouTube channel. There are articles on Academia Edu website. I was the worst student Ljubljana's Academy of Fine Arts could ever have. I barely passed the last year with the lowest grades. After finishing studies I wanted to drop art altogether. I got a job at the national TV of Slovenia where I still work as a journalist covering visual arts, architecture, comics, classical and contemporary music etc. After the millennium I started painting again. At first under strong influence of Basquiat, whose show I saw in Trieste at the end of the nineties. Actually it was Basquiat's show that pushed me back again into producing art. After 2003 I wanted to get rid of Basquiat's influence. So, one time I carried this one piece that had again been done in his style under water, while it was still wet. Water partially washed the image away. There was a silent scream in my head: "Look how the image dissolves." Washing the images away with water became my dominant painting technique. There were a couple of series of paintings made between 2004 and 2006 using this technique in a variety of ways. Between the beginning of 2007 and the beginning of 2010 there was a pause though. I was trying to expand on this idea and technique but wasn't successful. I realized later that I was trying too hard to show my invention as such. In early 2010 I came up with the necessary evolution. Since then, my work procedure can be described as follows: I make an image with paint. I then wait a couple of minutes and till some of it has dried. I then wash the image away with water. Patches of paint remain, of course. I then repeat this procedure with another paint until something gets formed out of the patches. Why is all of this important? This procedure of mine gets me beyond simple illustrating. It makes the onlooker feel as if the images got on the canvas all by themselves.