How do you go about establishing an art career in a foreign country? Well, I don’t really know but I’m doing my best to find out. Am I struggling with it? Hell, yeah!..
At the end of 2007, right before I moved to London, I had the chance to spend a few months in a small suburban town near San Francisco. I had little to do, no friends, no car, no work permit… and a husband who was working 60 hour weeks.
We were newlyweds, so the weekends we spent travelling around California were amazingly romantic. The rest of my days however dragged on – long, lonely and boring – the sun and the pool didn’t really help on the long run… This is when I started painting again. I had never really stopped painting entirely but the one or two paintings I used to complete in a year somehow didn’t really seem to amount to much in my mind,.. or in practice.
I started the easy way; I bought a canvas board, some oils, and a pretty bouquet of purple flowers from one of the few shops in the small town and painted this rather traditional still life. It was a purely technical exercise, the resulting piece turned out OK, but what it really brought me was the realization that:
Firstly, I had lost a lot of time and some of my skills… (How difficult can it really be to paint a bunch of flowers?)…
Secondly, I still enjoyed painting more than designing websites, which is what I had been doing for the last few years.
And finally, that if I wanted to be an artist instead, there would be no better time in my life to make the decision to do it professionally. Or… postpone it indefinitely… until, like, after my unborn children have grown, or something along those lines. The last option, I decided, wasn’t really an option.
I painted a few more painting while I was in the US but most importantly I started organizing my first serious exhibition. Years ago I had painted a series of Dancers so I figured that the easiest way to get into making serious art again would be to add a few new works to my Dancers series. Since I’m originally from Bulgaria, I decided that the best venue for my début exhibition would be the International Ballet Competition in Varna – the summer of 2008.
Precisely two years ago, in February 2008, my husband and I kissed sunny Mountain View good bye and landed at rainy Heathrow. I had no idea where I was going to live but I finally knew what I wanted to do with my life.
