Henryk M Fantazos

There are at least two ways to communicate in visual art: one works like a poster, where content is reduced into one mighty shout, like "conserve water!".Or- the content is artfully layered, ambiguous, somewhat occluded, defending itself against instantaneous consumption. That's how I build my art.

Yes,I choose to paint what appeals to me in visible world. That should not be some revelatory confession. Nudity is eminently a worthy subject for painting and I have never repressed that attraction .Where, Ruth did you get that rather outdated "freudism" repression? Do you know me to be repressed? Are you sure that you have the necessary intellectual groundwork in theory of principles of art to publicly express yourself on this, somewhat esoteric matters?

No, not incredible at all. I work on each painting for many months, often for years. When they are finished they don't look like a collection of splats&drbbles.

Maybe 8 or more years ago. The couple who bought it later split up and the woman ended with that painting..

Thanks,it is always a warm feeling to see that one's art is actually considered good enough to be a backdrop of someone's private life.This painting was sold log ago.

Pornography and prostitution are heavy industries of sex. I am interested in expressing something very private, occluded eroticism - almost opposite of porn , turning eros into public pissuar as what prostitution does. The whole human horizon is discreetly given to us with constant elements of temptation. We are not out of Eden yet!

Thanks Tereza! I really try my hardest to bring something yet unseen.

I'm glad you like it.

Painting is a lonely process! As to the slowness - that is the great luxury we can give our art when no one is rushing us to finish already! To me an artistic "absolutism" is the most interesting. By that I mean finding the best, the final form, the ultimate state of all elements in the artwork.

Narrow key of colors - very effective. The light is somewhat like operating theater but, yes- necessary. The optics, namely all the lines of perspective have strong smell of photography at its origin: am I right or have I guessed wrong and should apologize?

Perhaps you want that photo-realistic effect, but seems to me that you don't. Your art is too personal for the impersonal copying.

So glad you like it,Alison.

Glad you enjoy it so much. What's depressing is the percentage of apish smearing versus accomplished painting.

Thanks!

I am very glad you like it! I actually, to be thorough, brought two cotton shrubs to my studio. It was such intimate encounter with morphology of cotton.

Thanks. I am particularly pleased with this painting.

Thanks,Kate. I believe that painting's function is not decoration but communication. Poem wants to communicate and so do painting, especially when the artist actually has something demanding to be express. To show how radical I am about it I'd say that incoherent daubing, smearing or collaging is no more than adding more trash to the heap already as big as our planet.

Indeed, it is about seeing the powerful force of life ,triumphant over death and over other participants in the sinuous dance of living. Six kinds of vines attacking a tree.

Because I despise impressionistic painting I sat there for a very long month taking in and noting morphology of that hackberry as if it was a most engaging nude.

Glad you like it so much. The image wants to be humorous but not "absurd", like what surrealism demands.An important difference,I believe.

Thanks!

Just imagine them slowly, mock-solemnly marching to the rhythm of the Handel's Sarabande!