Iskan Iskan

Iskan paints emotional geometric abstractions oil on canvas.
Iskan is an abstractionist artist with a penchant for bright colors.

Born into a family of schoolteachers in 1956 in Tiraspol, at that time a town in Moldavia, now the capital of breakaway Transnistria, as a kid he was exposed to a Jewish environment. He was sort of maverick at school.
His mother comes from the Gansky family, a Ukrainian branch of the Polish Hańsky nobility known by the illustrious Eveline Hańska, the wife of the French writer Honoré de Balzac. His father was a Sunni Volga Tatar educated in Tashkent, Uzbekistan.

Iskan is a graduate interpreter and economist. Before practicing as a business consultant, he was employed at the Chamber of Commerce and Industry in Moscow and Bucharest.

Iskan put together a small yet fine collection of pictures by Soviet anti-communist nonconformist artists.

Never having studied art, unexpectedly took to painting oil on canvas in June 2015 aged 59. Iskan is a 100% self-taught artist.



Artistic Statement


I take sunlight and transform it into the colors of my paintings. The Sun’s energy passes into them.
My artwork comes from nature. I’m inspired by the sky, the sea, the line of the horizon, by the dusks...

I am 100% self-taught and take pride in it. It is one of my salient features.

MY GEAR OR TOOLS OF TRADE

Now let me give you a little insider peek into my artist’s studio. Let me show you what I paint with, although it’s all beyond the point: an artist paints with his brains, eyes, and emotions.
I don’t have a studio and I don’t really need one. I paint in my own house. I use a ground floor 19 square meters (205 sq. ft.) study as my studio, it is well lit with windows west and north and a glass door into the garden; the ceiling is sufficiently high - 2.60 m (8.5 ft). I mostly use Maimeri Classico Italian paints known for having little odor, I put my canvases to dry in the boiler room and I clean my brushes promptly.
SUPPORTS
I paint mostly on pre-stretched canvas from Russian St. Petersburg brand ARTICLE, blue line Profi, acrylic primer on linen. ARTICLE is my favorite brand since August 2015. Up to 2018, I preferred their Red Line with a triple coat of oil emulsion priming on top of three coats of sizing. The change in my preference was mostly because I came to use larger brushes for larger canvases, painting heavily yet keeping minute detailing on plane borders. I don’t need the minimum absorbency of oil priming anymore....

In 2015 – 2020 I displayed my art at 90 exhibitions in Berlin, Cannes, Florence, Minsk, Moscow, Nuremberg, Nice, Paris, and Venice, participating in 71 group exhibitions and holding 19 one-man shows including 6 personal museum exhibitions.

MY PAINTING TECHNIQUE
I work with bold colors. My palette is bright. Red and yellow cadmiums, cobalt blue and violet are my favorites. The chroma is usually high. I like to play off complementary (opposite) colors.
I pre-mix on the palette with a palette knife and layer on the canvas with brushes. I don’t mix colors on the canvas. I take quite some time and thinking for pre-mixing, yet at the end of the day, it happens intuitively and by sight. I tend to start with big shapes and to first fill larger planes with color, then go over to the smaller planes but it largely depends on the interplay and mutual arrangement of planes because I need to rest my hand on the canvas when doing the detailed edges of planes.
I don’t do any underpainting. I often do my paintings in one sitting, in one go, but usually, I leave time to let the paint dry in between layers. It looks like I block in but it is the final layer.
I use quality Italian-made Maimeri paints, only sometimes adding linseed oil; I don’t ...