If You Are In Baltimore Between March 19th And April 17th Come See My New Show Placeholder At The Carver Gallery Inside This Incredible School For Visual And Performing Arts. I Got A Chance To Visit With The Students And Do An Artists Talk Thanks To Daria Souvorova And Her Hospitality!

An Introduction To Narrative Portraiture

By H. Michael Sanders

Pictures tell stories in a different manner than do words, but rich and textured stories nevertheless. The shopworn notion that a picture is worth a thousand words, widely attributed to Fredrick R. Barnard from an article published in the 1920s about advertising, underscores the traditional use of art in society prior to the modern era. In this regard, the history of art is primarily a survey of the use of imagery to convey allegory, history and theology to a population of largely illiterate viewers. Think stained-glass scenes in cathedral windows, religious paintings of scenes and stories from the Bible, the historical pageants documented by royalty and nobles in commissioned paintings of their exploits, and scenes found carved into walls, tombs, monuments and plaques throughout the ancient world.

The eerie quality of familiarity, amid the influx of disjointed and incongruent elements found in the work of Boryana Rusenova-Ina, functions like an echoing memory in our mind that we can’t quite tune-in clearly or fully recall. Teetering between portrait and landscape, her paintings imbue the inhabited environment with a distinct personality that simultaneously reflects our expectations and renders them strange and unfamiliar.

This Group Exhibition At Adams State University In Colorado Explored New Approaches To The Landscape Genre.

I am very proud to be part of this juried exhibition at the Bakehouse Art Complex in Miami, FL. It is based on Thomas Lawson's essay on the status of painting written 35 years ago. Lawson's text put painters on the defense, holding each artist accountable for their choice of medium. It is as relevant today as when he first wrote it- Last Exit:Painting by Thomas Lawson

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Urban Arts Space Presents The Work Of Graduating Ohio State University Department Of Art, Master Of Fine Arts Candidates. The Product Of Three Years Of Intensive Studio Work, Research, And Experimentation, This Exhibition Highlights The Accomplishments Of A Diverse Group Of Emerging Artists

Boryana Rusenova-Ina paints collages bound by light. Using images of both the Bulgarian landscape of her youth and of places she has never traveled, she constructs small dioramas in her studio out of postcards, snapshots, and other pictures she finds or makes. Lighting these like miniature stage sets to unite the disparate parts, she then paints what she sees: an image that is both constructed and organic, real and imagined.

Her paintings present as a unified landscape—comfortable and coherent—and yet they maintain the unsettling suggestion that they might, at any moment, rupture our expectations and fly apart. Delicately surreal, Rusenova-Ina’s work speaks to both how tenuous and how fundamental our relationship with place can be.

I spoke with Boryana Rusenova-Ina in the OSU Digital Union’s recording studio. We talked about being foreigners in America, buying into images of unfamiliar places, and her unlikely arrival as an artist.

-Suzannah Showler