Canadian artist Mile Murtanovski paints “emotional energy” into his portraits and landscapes. Enjoy the work of this talented artist, and visit his website for more information.
For more than twenty years I’d been painting exclusively in watercolours, aspiring to become an excellent watercolourist, educating myself by studying many different artists and countless paintings, and working very hard to create paintings as interesting and as good as those by the artists I admired.
In recent years, however, I’ve also been working in inks and oils, giving me a wider range of media for my artistic expression and broadening my artistic ambition. Although I’m now primarily painting in oils, with only rare forays into the other media, I still have them at my disposal, enabling me to choose the medium that I feel would best suit any given subject/project.
Whatever the content, the theme running through my body of work is the exploration of light and dark, conveying emotional energy through their careful rendering. Contrast is very important to me, and I like to have a range in my paintings from very dark to very light.
Most of my ideas are initiated in my sketchbooks and, though I rely on my growing skills as a photographer to capture whatever the subject I’m interested in, I’ll go back to my sketchbooks and develop those ideas, changing the composition/colours until I’m ready to start painting based on this new reference.
I have also found joy in my commercial practice, creating architectural renderings, theatre posters, and advertising illustrations.
In March 2010 I moved to Prince Edward County, Ontario, where I’ve been co-artistic director of Small Pond Arts with my wife, writer Krista Dalby. Since then, I’ve found myself responding to my rural agricultural surroundings through my artwork, beginning with painting still-lifes featuring wines (a growing local industry) as subjects as well as using wine as a medium.
In early 2011 I painted a series of twelve portraits of local farmers called Field to Canvas, and to close out the year I began painting a series of local barns and the immediate landscapes around them, and this has led to my next series of paintings which are exclusively landscape based. Concurrently to these new landscapes, I’ll be returning to figurative painting as I embark on my very large Tournament of Shadows series.
Really like this work, especially the craggy detail in the face of the garlic seller. Lovely
Me too, Helen!