Tatjana Mirkov-Popovicki

Artist’s Statement

Intense exploration of the Canadian landscape in art famously began with the Group of Seven whose recognizable images became a source of Canadian visual language. With the modern outlook and a renewed passion, Canadian Landscape is nowadays being revisited by a new generation of public all over again.

This great country stretches over 3,855,103 square miles of breathtaking landscape. The Canadian landscape painters nibble at its incomprehensible vastness and bring those morsels of beauty as our small but precious presents to the public. I am one of those painters, enchanted and humbled with this honorable task.

In my style of painting, I bridge the traditional subject matter, contemporary techniques and visionary style that communicate shapes and colors through modern harmonies and textures. I paint scenes many will recognize as landmarks but also the hidden beauty of remote, hardly accessible locations. It is not always harmony in nature, especially in our vast wilderness. There is usually an element of something wild and something dissonant that amazes and inspires the viewer.

My thoughts take me beyond the "treeness" and "typical landscapeness" to the "beyondness" which I think is the essence of this place. That is something that I wasn't able to comprehend when I first immigrated to Canada – to the point that I wasn't really even seeing it. Coming from a part of world where the nature is tamed, either beautified or destroyed, seeing wild things needed an entirely different perspective. If one is used to looking for pre-composed, they will most likely miss paying attention to what appears on a first glance to be misfit shapes and what really is the treasure of the nature in Canada. The point of view needs to be readjusted to see and feel everything, from things subtle, to implausible sometimes even frightening.

For me, Canadian Landscape has this additional ingredient of oddness, abundance of things unexpected and stunning. The effects of fog, the play of sun on the mountain slope, the doings of storms and forest fires, countless conditions that make up our landscape. It all composes itself into great surprising patterns which burn into our minds and hearts.

While painting a landscape, my goal is to observe and interpret what I find especially powerful, in my own way.

I like to use a variety of tools to express my ideas: emphasized brushwork, color dissonance and harmony, directive linear elements, variations in the texture of the paint. This variety relates to the abundance of varieties found in the nature. Landscape is a strong and humbling subject; it often resists being captured on a piece of canvas and it plays many tricks with the artist. We can never win, but only take what the landscape agrees to give, and supplement the rest with our own imagination.