Blog

29 apr.
1 like

The spring is here

admin / Cluj artist, Contemporary Art, fine art, Gallery, International Art, Romanian art scene, Uncategorized / / 0 Comments

With every flower and every spring, beauty and hope flourish again on Earth. The same as these colorful miracles, the colors blooming on canvas bring joy and gratitude for the wonderful and inspiring nature. I painted these fragments of happiness while trying to capture the very essence of flowers, one of everlasting life and beauty.

12 dec.
1 like

October 2018 at Fountainhead Gallery

admin / Cluj artist, Contemporary Art, fine art, Gallery, International Art, Photos, Seattle Art, Uncategorized / / 0 Comments

This October found me in Seattle, where I had an exhibition at Fountainhead Gallery. My first trip to Seattle was two years ago, when the gallery invited me to exhibit my paintings among other American and international artists in a show entitled “Transcendence: Here and Now” – Landscape paintings from a Global Perspective. This time, the show consisted of new paintings inspired by the nature I love. “Mountain Love” represents a new series of paintings, a spiritual personal view translated through gestures of colors on canvases. Inspired by the deep and harmonious Transylvanian woods and rivers, I walk the thin line between figuration and abstraction. I’m in love with Nature, Light, and Water, and seek the sensations that fulfill the soul through the dazzling interplay between water and light. I see water as the essence of nature. Water also symbolizes the cycles of life. In its fluidity and blue-green color, water represents mystery, depth, calmness, and luminosity. My experiments with different types of tools and materials – feathers, fingers, Chinese brushes, reeds, sprigs – which I use to paint with, mixed with water as the medium for my recent paintings – watercolors – give me the joy of life, which I feel in “plein air painting,” right in the middle of nature itself. “Mountain Love” is, in certain ways, a metaphor for inner psychological and spiritual states, which are given a structure and a certain permanence through the physical nature of painting. After the opening, Seattle Symphony cellist, Nathan Chan and pianist, Oana Rusu Tomai, gave the audience a wonderful Enescu music recital – Enescu Sonata for cello and piano op. 26 no. 2, a masterpiece of great beauty and elegance. I would like to thank Sue and Ron Peterson, Paula Mueller, Laura Early, Oana Rusu Tomai, Alexandrina Maicaneanu who helped me make this show happen

06 feb.
1 like

Friendship on the water

admin / fine art, fly fishing, Gallery, Uncategorized / / 0 Comments

 

I’ve known Mihai since fine art high school, when we were simple acquaintances, but later on, when I discovered his passion for fly fishing, we instantly became close friends. This short video which shows some memories from a hot July in TN is dedicated to him, due to his invitation I discovered some of Tennessee’s finest fly fishing rivers. It was a very special trip, filled with fun, friendship, faith and trout. Fishing creates friendship relationships quicker than anything else I’ve seen in this world and my thanks also go to Roger Prentice, Jeremy Gasner and Beto Perez. I still remember the imposing figure of Shawn Madison as the guardian of the Clinch River… It’s the fly fishing lifestyle that brings two people together. As soon I found the time after the trip, I painted a few landscapes inspired by those rivers. Thank God for friends and beautiful nature!

 

Tennessee Fly Fishing from Presecan on Vimeo.

01 feb.
Like this

Back in Time – Vermont Studio Center

admin / International Art / / 0 Comments

After I finished college, I attended as a fellow artist the Vermont Studio Center in the US. It was an inspiring and helpful residency, where I met good artists, made friends. A few days ago, thanks to the “world wide web” I reconnected with Chris Chou, an artist I met during the residency, with whom I shared impressions, ideas and artistic knowledge. I remember the studio work, chatting, the plein air painting, the back-country walks along the Gihon River in the village of Johnson , Lamoille River (when I never thought I will one day start fly fishing and become on Orvis fan – a fishing tackle company established in Vermont). I enjoyed the working time and the company of fellow artists Ana Lopez Montes, Nicholas Constantakis, E.H. Sorrels -Adewale, Pamela Folsom, Valerie Pawlak, Shin Kyoung-Ho , Barbara White, Louis Finkelstein and others… It was a positive, creative period and staying, where I discover America’s values and Vermont’s intrinsic beauty. Places like Smugglers’ Notch and others revealed me the rural landscape and the local spirit.

About Chris:

Guggenheim Fellow 2007. Painting is an attitude about life. Painting gives me faith, because I know what I have been through. Painting teaches me to be humble, because there are so many Things I do not know. I see things very directly. I only select the form or color, which really speak to me. I am using personal symbols to tell the story of thing which I care. They come from nature and the relationship between people/things and God/me. I love color. I paint the color of red. I want to push red as far as it can go. Red is hot, red is blood, red is energy. I love form. I draw the form of circle. It could be an egg: the life itself. It could be a watermelon: the fruit that I enjoy. It could be a window: to lead you to another landscape. It could be an eye: but what an eye. I believe painting has the power to heal. I believe painting is my mission. My goal is simple, but is not easy. I want to make a great art. I want use it to share, to comfort, and to celebrate. Through my painting– May you smell different season of life. Have a date with surprise! Or…. Just simply a smile

05 iul.
Like this

My personal look into the post-revolutionary Romanian Art Scene

admin / International Art, Romanian art scene / / 0 Comments

I’m coming back with this article I wrote few years ago on Checkout[ART] about my personal point of view on the Romanian ante and post-revolutionary art scene. Scroll down and read it:

The important point, for me, resumes at before and after 1989, a turning point in the Romanian history, a year which marked the official break down of communism in the country.

For those who didn’t live the 80s in Romania, for those strangers to Romania who cannot imagine what “darkness” we lived in, I can say that even now, after more than 20 years, I still notice the same thing: the degree of ignorance and isolation the authorities kept us in. I do not refer to the material deprivations, but most of all to the spiritual and cultural ones. It was an ignorance of contemporaneousness, of information, of everything that happens in the free world. There is much to discuss about this subject and maybe it is well-known what the communist propaganda and politics meant, but I am referring to the inner moral support of my defense in front of this invasion, menacingly to the escape in nature (a still powerful and yet slightly altered nature, by the modern man) and to the deepening in the freedom offered by books. Returning to art, I well remember all the pleasures offered by the well-structured library of the fine arts school and especially of the Art Institute to a young high-school boy , the biographies I read, the painting in plein air, in the impressionist manner. In fact, the whole art history stopped for us in the 40s’. Everything that succeeded to reach us from outside were the few magazines, out of which we could vaguely create some opinions, without being able to draw any conclusions though.
It is only now that I realize the tragedies lived by the elder artists, the helplessness independent of their will, due to the fact that they were on the unwanted side of the curtain and could not travel free, the barriers, the jury and the existent censorship.
The psychosis of “running-away” in the Occident comes from those times, and it is felt acutely up to now, many times from the same reasons as then, including the helplessness of the place we live in. A distinction should be made here between the Romanian totalitarian art from its different periods and the art of the other communist countries. They shouldn’t be regarded as a whole, as each of them has its own individual identity.
There are three main periods to be noticed in Romania: the first one, realist-totalitarian of the 50s – 60s (the socialist regime applied for us, too), followed by an official art. An alternative art appears beside this official art  and it develops in the second level, oriented towards the Occident arts and the neo-avant-garde  of the post-war arts.
The 70s were full of the visions of the same conglomerate. This dualist situation continues in the third period, at the end of the 70s and 80s-90s. when the antagonisms already existent between the official and subversive, independent painting, deepen.
For us, the young ones, the opening offered by the “revolution” was welcome; it was like a new breath. The contacts with all that represented contemporary Occidental art became more powerful, we could “escape” to see live works and museums which we only knew from books or albums. The 90s were the “pioneer” years, I could say, when we learned everything on the fly and entirely without the help of the state and its instruments.
These were years when we searched for levers of support and promotion. The same almost taboo vision still remains today upon galleries and gallery owners who “make” artists by promoting and selling them at higher and higher quotations.
The Romanian art scene still stays behind, it struggles behind an emergent economy and a generalized lack of interest. Most of the artists, at least those who want to create and tell their story, are themselves curators, managers and gallery owners. The private system, still developing, supports too little the art, even if there are a few who sustain artists or cultural non-governmental associations. Unfortunately, the state is still far away from this, even if there are some changes in attitude. In fact, and this is the most important thing, the attitude and the mentality of those on board of the art institutions, is quite poor.
Romanian society today is changing, or at least trying. There are a lot of things to be mentioned here about mentality, our way of being, but also about a certain helplessness in recovering in a short time a viable and sustainable assertion systems. It all resumes at the economic and financial national power, at the galleries and museums which consecrate, at the collectors who purchase the artistic product.
We still live in an individualist stage of small groups who have succeeded in making a breach in the system and have become international in some parts of the country. In Romania, unfortunately, the artist remains the main actor or pawn, a soldier on this chess table which is called the art scene, without any other “officers” to help him, a kind of Don Quixote of nowadays, or maybe since always.

Copyright Claudiu Presecan © 2023. Toate drepturile rezervate.