From the interview to “C de L’ART” Magazine n°21 – France/ Paris :

« I have two passions: painting and music. All of my works have been created in tandem with sound. »
Serguei Borodouline is an experienced Russian artist based in Canada whose paintings have been featured in national exhibitions. Working in oil and acrylic on canvas, he does not limit himself to one artistic genre and paints everything from surrealist landscapes to fantastical portraits. His work is characterized by a blue and purple color palette and each painting is full of imaginative possibilities.”

Interview with Serguei Borodouline

Q. What are you thinking about these days?
A. I think that we are on the threshold of global world events

How do you introduce yourself?
My artworks do it for me : )

What do you tell people when they ask about the ideas in your work?
My work should speak for itself.

Can you tell us about this latest series?
The latest series change each other quickly.

How does music play into your work?
I have two passions: painting and music. All of my works have been created in tandem with sound.

What did you want to be when you were growing up?
An Astronomer.

What’s your background?
Engineering Physicist Ph.D. + Siberian Art School.

What is the best piece of advice you have ever received?
Too much.

What is the best advice you don’t follow (for good reason)?
None.

What is one thing they tried to teach you in school that you knew immediately was wrong?
History: it is plenty of fantasy.

Who is the one person, dead or alive, that you would like to have dinner with and why?
My father.

Where is your favorite place?
The Ocean.

Who are your biggest influences?
Zdzislaw Beksinski, Regarding painting, I take of my hat off to Dali, Beksinski, Kramskoy, Savrasov, Klimt, and many more.

Which current art world trends are you following?
For their own

What can’t you live without?
Music and Painting

What is your dream project?
Ahead

What’s your favorite artwork?
Luis Ricardo Falero “Witches going to their Sabbath”

What is currently on your playlist?
So many, and depending on the moment: Shostakovich, Rachmaninov, Verdi, Bach, Schnittke, Penderecki, Ketil Bjornstad, Nick Cave, Robin Guthrie, Harold Budd, Brian Eno, King Crimson, Vangelis, etc. And still in favor Yes, Genesis, Miles Davis, Tord Gustavsen, Pat Metheny, Bryan Ferry, and more.

What gives you life?
Experience

What is your superpower?
Be humble

What do most people believe that you do not?
For me, Faith and Religion are absolute opposites.

What imaginary place would you love to visit?
Out of Earth

What is your favorite thing in the world, and why?
Dreams. For me, this is the greatest mystery, like Music and Water.

Artist Statement

In the pursuit to better redefine modern surrealism, I often find myself indulging in the vibrancy of color and concise composition with flaring elements of Sacred Geometry. The same level of intense detail is implored in all of my work but this series attempts to focus on the singularity and realism of the objects in my visions. I want to convey the world through another dimension: To see the hidden geometry that makes up everything in the universe. My education in 3D animation comes back in a surprising way as I break down complex organisms into their most basic shapes much like polygon modeling.

Allowing myself to fully run free in my mind, I travel to any environment or vacuum my heart desires. I am traveling everywhere I want to go, so I can be closer to my dreams and become better at actualizing them. This project has been an awakening of my true self that needed all previous lessons to attain.

Iterations have proven to be my strongest vehicle for exploring my fascination with shapes and dreamlike imagery via oil and acrylic paintings on canvas and panel. Dreams represent a higher dimension of consciousness to me, documented by Edgar Casey to be a medium of infinite insight, problem-solving and premonition. It seems only natural for one to explore this realm of higher consciousness on a 2 dimensional medium with the higher spacial dimensions, where Platonic Solids, Archemedian Solids and other geometries seem to unlock a representation of the underlying structure of nature.

The work also has hidden implications to the impact of evolution and attaining knowledge, for better or worse. We yield so much potential with recent discoveries, but as a race, we seem to be struggling with the same concerns of our ancestors. Survival is an on-going theme in my work especially in the face of misused information. I’m concerned with the persistence of imbalance in a technological age that could unite the world in abundance. The artwork will definitely cause a lot of progressive thinking and discussion about the unification of art and science, power and knowledge, predator and prey.

My goal is to blend the surreal with the real. To walk the lines of what is a thought and what is a movement, and mostly, to reach a higher state of mind through art.

Biography

Born April 1st, 1984 and growing up in the ever-crowding greater Houston area, Vincent Fink is an award-winning contemporary surrealist & full-time artist working out of his Winter Street Studio in the Arts District where he tirelessly adds to a multitude of expansive projects. His first series, Atlas Metamorphosis, started in 2010 with vigorously detailed greyscale sumi ink drawings spawned from a lucid dream. Since then, his art evolves from his series of Sacred Geometry Surrealism paintings, called Iterations, to multimedia public art and installations including sculpture and animation. The subconscious, with its symbolic story-telling, has always played a part in his cultural narrative message.

After attaining a degree in Media Arts & Animation from The Art Institute of Houston, he worked as a graphic designer searching in life for a higher purpose, a direction with his artistic abilities, yet was extremely lost. Then one night, with a sketch pad by his bed, he dreamt his future and immediately awoke to record it. In his subconscious state, he saw the first completed piece that would establish his art career. This series became known as the Atlas Metamorphosis and continues to take us through the 4 stages of an other-worldly, gigantic god-like beetle’s evolution. Each stage of its life cycle is accompanied by a new cultural empire or era of civilization.

This series won him the Talent Call Award, The Big Show – Best of, as well as a Hunting Art Prize finalist, twice, along with many shows and articles online and in print, but that is just one hemisphere of this, now, activated imagination. His second, most prolific series of acrylic and oil paintings called Iterations also garners equal prestige and focuses on his love for surrealism and sacred geometry.

Editor’s Note: Vincent Fink’s limited edition prints are now available for purchase in the Surrealism Today online store.

Vincent Fink Elsewhere on the Web

• vincentfink.com
• instagram.com/vincentfink/
• facebook.com/vincentfinkart/

Artist’s Statement

I’m a surrealist but I also consider myself a landscape painter.

I like to paint biomorphic forms but I’m also interested in capturing the moods of various landscapes.

I like to depict the weather and the seasons – the seasons especially because seasons note the passing of time.

Winter has a special meaning for me as well. It represents solitude and wonder.

Much of my work is inspired by ‘mindscape’ music such as New Age, psychedelic, certain classical pieces, prog rock and medieval music.

As I grow older I’ve become increasingly more intrigued by what life’s Final Door has in store for us. Is it a doorway to eternity or oblivion?

James McCarthy on DeviantArt
James McCarthy on Facebook

Artist Statement

Wallpaper patterns, plasterwork or just doodles have always animated my fantasies. I’ve recognized paintings in them and lost myself in the surreal world. Back in my childhood, those were the first contacts with surrealism.

When I was going to school, I used to draw doodles and sketches into my school books. It often started with a simple line that got embellished, shaded and like that everything found its place. One after another.

Letting things create themselves is an important step in my working. I start working without any plans, I let it arise. I don’t work with deadlines, the painting is finished when everything is its right place and I’m satisfied with the painting. I often only realize what it represents when I’m finished.

My goal is to represent the tremendous expressiveness of nature through my paintings. The power and strength of the wind, the dryness of the ground and even the humid air before a thunderstorm. In my eyes, nature is the mightiest of all artworks.

That’s when I combine nature with opposing motives. Surreal elements arise and join in.

First, the canvas is worked on with acrylic followed by multiple layers of oil paint. I mix the surreal and abstract with the intent to create an atmosphere.

I see my paintings as a window, through which you can glimpse another world.

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Seamless is a Digital Composite Collage Artist

Artist: Seamless on Redbubble
Prints: Seamless on Society6

Philippe Charles Jacquet is an architectural painter: his haunting surrealistic landscapes are an exercise in precision, layered variety, and esoterism

Opening Reception on 27 April, 2019, 6-8pm
RSVP Required: info@hugogalerie.com

Les Reclus is a solo exhibition featuring the carefully articulated dreamscapes of Philippe Charles Jacquet to be exhibited at the Hugo Galerie in New York City. The show introduces new pieces by the artist in his celebrated style in which he builds his watery worlds with various and highly planned painting techniques.

Les Reclus’ title is more relevant to his canvas’ structural capacity than their figural; while most canvases contain more than one figure, rarely does a canvas contain more than one structure. The reclusivity of Jacquet’s built environments, dramatically poised within surreal and stretching landscapes, lends his paintings an enigmatic quality. Adding to their mystery is the fact that they cannot be quickly dismissed as make-believe—they are too realistic, too aligned with our own experiences of stone houses, wooden rowboats, reflection pools, receding tides, and cloud-filled horizons. Even the slope of a figure’s slouching shoulders is too… personal.

Jacquet is an architectural painter; he plans his landscapes and their built environments with measured precision, constructing them in a layered variety of media and methods until they are as real as they are imagined. The materiality finessed, from mirror-like water to rust-scored wood grain, brings his painted compositions to life. The combination of textures, geometric accuracy, and concise colors creates an esotericism that includes viewers rather than excludes them; Jacquet’s solitary structures do not reject but envelop the viewer with the familiarity of a feeling. As if we’ve been here before. Perhaps in a dream.

Hugo Galerie is a fine art gallery in New York City specializing in contemporary figurative painting and sculpture. The gallery represents an international roster of artists working in a variety of media and range of genres.

Le Reclus, oil on board, 311⁄2″ x 311⁄2″ (80 x 80cm)
Le Port d’Attache, oil on board, 283⁄4” x 351⁄2” (73 x 90.2cm)
Une Soirée Ordinaire, oil on board, 471⁄4″ x 471⁄4″ (120 x 120cm)

See Jacquet’s previous feature in Surrealism Today from 2015.

Artist Statement

   At a very young age when I had only a vague idea of the meaning, it was predicted that I was an artist. This was from observations by my elementary school teachers and encouragement from my Mother, who not only appreciated art but was also a talented painter. The title of artist tended to give me a kind of identity…a suggestion that I was gifted in a certain way. With only that assumption as my guide, I pursued drawing and painting without academic training.  My earliest attempts were produced by my sense of awe when pouring through books and art magazines. The works of a famous surrealist caught my eye at age twelve.  From that time forward I would say that I was basically self-taught. That is not necessarily a compliment. There are areas I will never be proficient in yet the simple love of creating art drove me to figure things out along the way.  It wasn’t until I was 31 that I availed myself of some formal art training but by then I had already spent many years working in commercial graphics, technical illustration, animation, photography, and film production. Those earliest accomplishments tutored my creativity but did little to satisfy my urge to paint large meaningful works. That would have to wait a while. A very fortunate aspect of my career in the earlier years was the wide variety of artistic areas I managed to find work in. In each decade from the seventies, I augmented commercial art with a few fine art paintings. Results were slow at first, I was yet to emerge from all the strict confines of commercial work to the freedom of just painting for imagination’s sake.

   I partnered in a three-man show in 1988 and hung a one-man show in 1990. After a serious painters block in the mid-nineties, I re-awoke determined to attend to a lifelong desire…that of large canvases with more serious intent. As the turn of the century approached, I couldn’t escape a distinct feeling that something big was going to happen. I began painting futuristic images inspired by the notion that entering the third millennium should be punctuated by some visionary artwork.

   I’ve always remembered the words of my favorite art teacher; ‘produce a sense of light direction’. I have only reached that lofty goal on occasion. In some of my recent works, I’ve attempted to capture beauty in the midst of calamity to produce a sense of wonderment and emotional response. And of course, there’s often a curiosity about symbols present and their interpretation. So after a significant time spent in seclusion, I offer a few pieces that came into being in the past 6-8 years.  These four canvases are connected;  Surrealistic Quadriptic.  There’s more from the past and hopefully from the future as well.

More: surrealprecog.com

Joshua Osburg is a contemporary artist living and working in Saint Louis, Missouri. His primary mediums are oil paintings and graphite drawings. His work is inspired by his experience as an Iraq War Veteran and life before and after war. His art reflects the subconscious interests and endurances of those who have suffered trauma and the cruelness of the human condition. Using his own experiences, he explores the relationship between mental health disorders and the sufferer. His paintings and drawings unhinge negative thoughts by relinquishing them to panel and paper.

Inspired by renaissance artists like Titian, expressionists like Otto Dix and the surrealist movement, Joshua Osburg employs various techniques and theories into his work as components of his expression. Joshua Osburg received his Master’s in Fine Arts with an emphasis in painting from Fontbonne University in Saint Louis, Missouri in May of 2018.

Mark Hopkins Surrealism

The landscapes of Mark Hopkins are as gorgeous as they are mind-bending. Hopkins’ surrealistic techniques include playful visual distortion, juxtaposed symbols, and abstract surrealism in combination with a mastery of the craft of painting.

The first painting in the gallery above shows the Buddha hovering in the air in an archetypal temple. The scene is calm. Juxtaposed with this peaceful imagery is the ‘fallout shelter’ symbol on the tiles of the floor. The repetition of this symbol in an otherwise serene environment startles the viewer. It invites us into the work with Hopkins to reflect and process. Other symbols (which you’ll need to discover for yourself) further add the complexity, ambiguity, and depth of this image.

Hopkins’ gorgeous contemporary surrealistic paintings are both profound and ineffable.

Mark Hopkins Artist Statement

My paintings consist of elements assembled into stories or into ‘mood-scapes’. I place the recognizable into the supernatural as a way to invite a viewer to co-create a narrative from their understanding of what’s in a given composition. There is content, for sure. But it is flexible content or perhaps it is ‘content under construction’. Why? Perhaps it’s because I want more out of a work of art than straight representation can offer. My work adjusts to mood, current events, individual personalities, and to itself. It is possible come away with a different interpretation with each viewing. Bang for buck.

There are a few things I hope to say through the oeuvre of my work; That the Earth is precious, time is precious, life is precious, that our mind is amazing, that history is way more profound than we think, and that there are mysteries lurking which can provide insights into who we are, why we are here, and how ‘it’ all works. Graham Hancock calls us a people who have forgotten our past. My paintings both acknowledge and challenge that: We are finding what we forgot – awakening and reconstructing our past – but we might want to hurry.

I hope my work pleases my audience. I hope they play with it, enjoy the quirks, the color, and find it satisfying.

hopkinesque.com

victo-ngai.com