It is an impregnable challenge to work in five different media of art concurrently and still maintain relatively the same high standard and quality in all of them. The advantage of this, however, is that they function like brothers and sisters from the same family. My experience in one, helps develop outstanding techniques in the others. Sketching, drawing, and draftsmanship are basic in my art, and I know for sure that no amount of coloring, painting, or glazing can improve the quality of a wrongly executed basic form. I have been exploring oil on canvas, permanent wall tile murals, experimental and traditional ceramics, and portraits for many decades. My sole aim is to capture the beauty of nature and freeze it for eternity. I communicate with my art pieces in a language and world known to me only, and they are my main source of joy and happiness every day of my life.
Oil on canvas has been my main medium for visual expression for many years besides ceramics, but I decided to experiment with soft pastels on paper in January 2022.
I found the experience very interesting, friendly, and it has brought me a lot of success. Now, I use it to tell visual stories about happenings in New York City and its boroughs. It is about capturing and freezing interesting actions in the city.
My oil paintings are one-of-a-kind stories conceived through lifetime experience, dreams, discussions, observation of human profiles, and the constant search to create something out of nothing. I believe in the timelessness and freedom of themes explored to conjure warmth and an aura of tropical colors that embrace well-manicured draftsmanship of pictorial elements placed in cascading spaces bathed in diffused light. Emerging and vanishing to infinity, lost and found pictorial elements in gestural poses are typical of my presentation of these unique stories.
Most of my paintings cannot be understood just within a glance, rather, it requires deeper thinking to unravel the true story. Some patrons have kept on discovering new objects even after living with my paintings for five years or more. That is intriguing. The basic message in my paintings, however, is focused on love, tolerance, and mutual respect for fellow human beings to enhance a reasonable co-existence. I do a layering style of painting in my oil works.
It is quite exciting for me to be able to do both experimental and traditional ceramics concurrently well. The clay is an amazing material which I love to manipulate and unleash realistic or abstract forms from it. It enables me to explore various themes. The fact that I am capable of creating any type of mold makes it possible for me to reduce the weight of my wares when necessary. When an image is uncovered from the clay, prepared, and fired, I then feel it’s time to dress it up, just like we humans wear our favorite dresses when going out on very important occasions.
I always loved to lookout for the right glaze and color for a particular form in order to make it exquisitely attractive. I am an advocate of flamboyant colors on properly designed forms. In this medium, I sculpt three-dimensional figures, throw the wheel, and produce lots of convex and concave bas-relief objects and images.
Painting murals on walls has always fascinated me, but painting on wall tiles, firing them in a kiln, and making the glaze stay on permanently, had been a challenge. Thanks to my longtime experience with oil painting, I can express myself in this medium just as well as I do oil on canvas, and there is no limit to the themes I can work on. There is also no limit to size or topic. This art form can be used in bathrooms, kitchen backlashes, hallways, lobbies, facades, and swimming pools. With great pleasure, I translate concepts into visual images in mural form.
Portraiture, for me, is the ability to present people’s personalities inside-out on a painted surface or sculpted. I always communicated with my subjects while painting them, in order to familiarize myself with who they really are. I produce portraits by order, and execute them either live or from photos, depending on my client’s preference. My major concern in this form of art is to surprise my client with a striking resemblance and a close portrayal of the person’s character/personality on canvas. I do unlimited portrait painting or drawing, going from the bust to the whole human body. A single person or multiple. I can create portraits in various media.
