Painting
expression
freedom
observation
meditation
journey…
For me, painting is an escape, a journey.
It’s a way to get closer to me, to meet and observe myself.
It is communication with those who see my works.
I see painting is a gift to myself.
My works have something abstract and specific at the same time.
Perhaps I like to balance between the real and the imaginary world.
I do not think I can identify where I belong artistically or what I draw inspiration from. I’m
not interested in being labelled. I cannot be limited by artistic styles or materials either.
Art is freedom (perhaps one of the few existing forms of freedom).
My first contact with painting was in Georgia, when I was 9 years old; a neighbour used
to help students prepare for Fine Arts university. That is where I learned to observe, to
measure, to shade, to create volume …
After that, there was a long pause until my student years. There, in Uzbekistan, I started
to meditate. Meditation opened up a new, inner world. I began to visualise pictures, to
observe, memorise them and to make an attempt to capture them in the real world.
That was quite challenging, as, compared with the observation of set, stable and tangible
objects when I was nine, I now had to observe images that sometimes only lasted for a
few seconds. And then they vanished forever.
It would have been a shame to let all these images go, for this trip to an imaginary world to vanish forever.
Irini Gogua