Selfportrait Print

Artistic process Throughout my life, visual arts guided me like a compass, to explore myself and others. I was born in 1986 in Central Asia and moved to Belgium in 2001. At the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, I was trained as a painting conservator. There is a certain feeling that creates a desire to express. I love when I am affected by a fragment in everyday life. It can be anything: A twisting branch of a tree, a dark cloud with light cracks, an object from my childhood, a love story, an old book with a special smell, burgundy color, prussian blue, payne's gray, a protagonist, a thought, a sketchbook from 20 years ago, Muddy Waters song and Old masters. When I am working I am looking for a well-articulated method to represent each concept by using the visual language accordingly. That's why I started with video installations at some point. Video is a perfect medium for image, movement and sound. In the past two years I have been working intensively with oil paint. Technically, there are a lot of possibilities that I am still discovering. I like to examine images from different time periods. I consider this part of the lab. I have two personal approaches to my artistic process. The first approach is introspection and retrospection. The portrayal of people is my fascinating point of interest. The paintings reflect the changing relationship between man and world. The second method starts from a question or fascination with a particular use of visual aspect, for example mastering the tone and hue. What I have learned is that not a single day should pass without a sketch. There is no time to waste.