"Brick oven magic"
(oil painting on canvas, 24X36, 2007)
You see things; and you say, 'Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I say, 'Why not?'
George Bernard Shaw
"This world is but a canvas to our imaginations."
Henry David Thoreau
"I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them."
Pablo Picasso
'Brick oven magic' was my first attempt to show other people the world as I see it. My near-sighted eyes send blurry images to my mind and in turn my mind brings to life inanimate objects and uneven surfaces. It constantly transforms patterns, paint chips, scratches or any other lines and shapes I see around me into people or animals, which makes my world quite amusing.
Click here to see the brick oven that inspired this painting. If you look carefully I believe that you'll be able to notice where all the elements in the painting came from. The most obvious ones you'll find on the gray (cemented) side of the oven. I was amazed when I first discovered the face of a Musketeer with a full silhouette of his beloved dame in the foreground. The fact that both people I was seeing came from the same time period blew me away. By now you're probably thinking that I'm a total loon that 'sees things'. That doesn't bother me, because I see myself as Alice in Wonderland, as somebody who by some miracle was able to retain imagination of a child that most of us loose when we enter adulthood. I guess people like me are the ones that discover faces of Jesus on their cheese sandwiches or figures of Madonna on a fence post, but I see that as a very positive thing because my imagination insures that there are always things that I can discover and be amused by.
