Ovanes Berberian was born Armenia and is living in US since 1977.
He has a very distinctive style, an aggressive brush stroke and a lovely lack of attention to details.
At the same time, he has a superb capacity of capturing the essence in just a few brush strokes. His paintings are dominated by light and color while shapes are almost not present.

Standing in front of an Ovanes Berberian painting you must step quite back to be able to see the shapes. This kind of impressionism should, in my opinion, be called anti-photorealism.

By a remarcable coincidence. the presentaiton on this website helps. Have a look at the thumbnails first. Try to imagine how much detail is needed to capture this landscape on canvas. Then click on the thumbnail to see it larger.
The difference in details from the expectations produced by the perfect representation of light and color is fantastic. I am convinced that a perfect copy of the landscape, for example a photo of it, would produce the same thumbnail when reduced. But when blown up to the size of the painting, what a difference. This is Berberianț’s talent. A perfect copy I can get from my photo camera.

His website still doesn’t have much information but you can see more of his paintings here and here.

For example, I have thrown away the old articles navigator, with the “read more” link replacing the articles page with a visual navigator.
Before, I had to choose the first couple of sentences in such a way as to entice the visitor to click on read more.
But this website is visually rich, thanks to the wonderful works of art I’m presenting so a visual representation of the article may be even more attractive than a few well chosen words.

Then, I am hoping the design is a bit more modern, with all those transparency effects and reflections. I also tried to be much more verbose wit hall the elements the user will need to walk around the website. Like the Read More! section at the bottom of the article. I figured there’s no need to be skimpy with the categories / next articles / previous articles links. On the contrary, users might appreciate having rich navigation controls on every page, provided they are easy to use and they don’t get in the way.

I am hoping that the simplicity and unusual position for the logo will create a nice effect as well.

And I tried to make it all about the content of the articles, an not about the structural elements of the website, leaving as much space as possible for the article content. This is why I moved the fixed header I had before to the right, there’s more space horizontally than vertically with these 16:9 monitors.

I have designed and redesigned every aspect of this blog, even the most simple thing like the position of “the about me” link.
All in all, it took me 3 weeks of design, using only Paint.NET by the way; I didn’t write a sing line of code in the first 3 weeks.
Later on, it took me 2 weeks to implement it using WordPress 2.9 (PHP based technology, not my strongest point). I wrote a theme from scratch and the result is really not the average blog or so I’m hoping. I was very pleased to learn about the Image Flow component written by Finn Rudolph, a javascript library, very small, very neat, that works amazingly on every browser. I have modified it slightly and I used it for the visual navigator on the landing page and the text only navigation control in the footer of every article.
I am of course still using the great Slimbox library for browsing article images and the jQuery library which makes Slimbox possible.

No content was lost wit the migration thanks to the great import/export features in WordPress but some of the existing external links may not work anymore.
I am hoping that most of them will work just fine.

This is the end result. I hope you like it. Come back now and again, I will return to writing as soon as I catch a breath of air, the past 5 weeks were difficult. I am tired but excited.

Happy holidays everybody.

I wanted to present Dmitri’s work ever since but I simply couldn’t find photo’s of a reasonable quality to showcase.
Finally I decided to go ahead with these though I am not perfectly happy with them.

Dmitri started painting at the age of 5 and went to art school and then to the Art College of Kharkiv, his home town.
Kharkiv is the second town in size in Ukraine and a large center for culture and education and its art museum features a series of paintings signed Dmitri Danish.

Dmitri paints the most beautiful impressionistic cityscapes. He is 43 years old now, a member of the Union of Ukrainian Artists and an internationally acclaimed painter. His work was admired in exhibitions in Ukraine, Russia, Europe and US.
He likes to travel through Europe to find inspiration, as you can definitely tell by looking at some of his works.

His work does resemble Goloubetski’s work in some aspects, but it is obviously and exquisitely unique.
I like the heavy textures, the superb warm colors, and the discrete presence of people. I like his little coffee shops the narrow alleys and his romantic canals.

Unfortunately he has no website though he is well represented in a couple of galleries that do have an on line presence.

There is something that I don’t really understand in his paintings. Maybe it is the art-naive, hedonistic palette of colors he uses. Maybe it is the “Je m’en fiche”-istic combination of scratches, smudges, knife daubs, fine splashed streaks of paint, seemingly arbitrary and dazzling, universal in his works.

But what a result!

What an array of textures, so rich it would be enough by itself even in a complete lack of color. I don’t care very much for the Barbie-doll, playful, baby-clothes colors he uses sometimes. But that, I think, is part of his philosophy, establishing the positive air of his art. I do like his subjects, quite a lot, be them beautiful cities and buildings or lush nature and autumn colors.

Let’s enjoy together some paintings signed Vlad Kravchuk.

And, in case you understand Russian, pay a visit to his website.

Ioan Lado de Zakal painted many churches in Bucovina and Basarabia until he left for South America and was never heard of again.
He was a Romanian noble man born in Săcalul de Pădure from a family known since 1600.
He spent 25 years in Italy and came back with a team to build roads, railroads and tunnels in Romania.
He also built and was a teacher in a public school in the Răstoliţa village.
The information on Ioan Lado de Zakal is available only in romanian language here.

In may this year I have received a totally unexpected email, signed Virgil Tornoreanu.
“Last month, Jeremy won Portrait’s Society of America 2009, International Portrait Competition in Washington DC Honor Award.
Here is a link to the painting from Jeremy. But if you want to see it in real life, it is in Timisoara, I bought it 2 years ago. It returned form DC last week”

Jeremy Lipking won 3 more awards from Portrait Society of America, in the previous years, starting with Best Of Show 2006, First Place 2007 and Exceptional Merit în 2008.

Virgil Tornoreanu is an art collector and a firend of Jeremy Lipking. He lives in Timișoara and he contacted me after reading the article on Lipking on this website. In his words “I wrote to you cause I was surprised to find an article on Jeremy Lipking in the Romanian language.”

I too was delighted and surprised so I asked mister Tornoreanu to tell me about himself.

Virgil is “portfolio manager in 2 companies (Werk MB Construct, www.werk.ro 150 employees and Top Agregate, www.topagregate.ro 30 employees). And General Manager in Best Agregate, a mining company with 40 employees, BD-Top OstEuropaInvest, www.osteuropainvest.at wit h10 employees, VOX FileMaker Solutions, www.filemaker-solutions.ro with 12 employees, providing turn key solutions for small businesses. I am on the bord of 6 other companies in tourism, food industry, etc. And I am an associate in a special glass constructioins company in Austria (were I also was General Manager till 2 years ago, www.glasbaucreativ.at).
I have graduated the business university in Hagen, Germany and the Constructions college Capus Fachhochschule, in Viena.

I got my appetite for art reading Gombrichțs “Art History”. I am grateful to a friend of mine in the US who made me read it saying “read the first 50 pages”. But I could not stop readidng and I read it again several times. I think it is the very best book to introduce you to art. What transforms an art lover into an art collector? That’s easy, the money.
I am past the point were the material possession had priority. I think you can find happiness and joy in art and all that is spiritual, music, painting, ballet and so on.”

Virgil being a friend of Jeremy and an art collector, I was curious to learn if he shares my opinion on contemporary versus classical masters .
My opinion, to put it abruptly (it is going to agitate spirits even if I try a softer phrasing) is this. Contemporary masters reached such subtlety and the technique that surpasses any classical painter. They reached a quality never seen in art before. A Lipking is extraordinary and his art has a museum quality.
But I wanted to ask mister Tornoreanu “What makes “Garcon a la Pipe” worth 100 million dollars, while a Lipking is 10 to 100 thousands dollars.“. I was implying that the price for a Picasso has nothing to do with an intrinsic quality of the painting. May have something to do with the vanity and the indifference to money of some collector.

Virgil agreed with me but wanted to phrase it in a slightly differently way.

“Contemporary masters ar just as good as the classics. But the price difference is based on many factors. The age of the author is one. Lipking is still young, he has time to grow. In 20, 30 his paintings will have a totally different price. Have a look at Lucien Freud who is 90, still paints and does so for quite a while. He has sold paintings with 20, 30 Million $. And
we know how the classics were living their lives.
There is more. At their time, those paintings were being sold for the same prices as those of today. The price is so high now cause they are much more rare. In 100, 150 years, a lipking will be 1000 or 10000 times more expensive.”

“Jeremy loves art. Don’t ask him to deliver a speach to the crowd but i n private he is fantastic. He can speak volumes about painting art in general or sports, movies and politics. He is a nice guy and you can have a drink with him, you will have a great time.

I know him for 3 years and the 3 times a year I travel to California I am meeting him (I am visiting a lot of painters). Today, Jeremy is considered the very best in this romantic figurative painter and he is young. His technique is fantastic and his works are museum ready.
A very good friend of mine who left the country during Ceausescu’s regime and now lives in California (surgeon in his own clinic nad the most passionate art lover I know) introduced me to him.”

I am delighted to know Virgil. I am delighted he is romanian and I am delighted that there are Jeremy Lipking paintings on a wall in Timișoara..

Most visitors are from Romania, US and UK. Bounce rate, a factor which measures the users that were probably
not looking for the content they found on my site is quite high. 61% of the new users that got here left immediately.

54% of the visitors found out about the site searching the Internet (47% google, 5% yahoo), .
The most popular articles are those on the Voynich manuscript, Jeremy Lipking and Gleb Goloubetski.

People are using Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera. The percentages are far from what the most websites are touting.
Firefox (35%) did not overcome Internet Explorer (46%) and Opera has almost 11% not the 2% they are credited with.

He had exhibitions in Netherlands, in Belgium, Germany, France, US and Japan.
He is very popular indeed. Unfortunately more on the commercial side, ever present in the catalog of all the companies that offer framing / art prints / posters online.
I am not going to lie, most of his works I don’t like.
They are often are much too romantic, better suited as a background for the credits in a soap opera series than in an art gallery.

And that is entirely because of the idyllic, all too sweet subjects depicted in his works.

But his choice of subjects apart, Willem Haenraets does have talent.
He uses water color and acrylic and hues so delicate that they add a sort of mystery to the scene.
I have chosen 3 works for you to see, which I really like. Have a look at the ethereal ladies in the first two.
They have this look as if captured mid-flight, somehow floating over the shapeless landscape into which they almost blend.
I like the eerie air, when in small doses, makes them look like the standstill of a dream.

I hope you will enjoy them too.

He does not have a website in the true sense of the word but www.willemhaenraets.com will point you too a section dedicated to him hosted at Waterland Art Press.

Her strikingly distinct style won me over instantly. Her works are beautiful, powerful and warm.
But what is her style? The minimalist approach and the distorted proportions point towards art naive.
Her paintings are representing the reality as if distiled through the eyes of a child.
The simplified, intensified colors and rounded, oversized shapes may be representing the reality that we used to see and now have lost as we got older.

Her bold brush stroke makes me think Russian expressionism.
She has an interesting ability to reduce the level of details while at the same time maintaining the visual richness using a thick texture.

She has a soft spot for country side landscapes, red roof houses and picket fences.
And everything has this fairy tale look that I am not sure I can pinpoint.
Maybe it is because of the altered proportions as in the church tower reduced in height but normal in diameter.
Maybe it is because of the exaggerated dimensions as in the tree leaves as large as a house.

Marie-Claude Boucher was born in Quebec in 1973. Dedicated herself to painting soon after graduating university.
She does not have a website but she’s well represented in a number of galleries like Gallery 1080, Gallery 223 and Crescent Hill.

Here is a selection of her works.