Reflections

Once I had secured a venue for the exhibition… and my father’s participation in the project, it was time to create some new art work. Anyone who’s ever stopped painting and then started again would know that being confronted with a blank canvas and an exhibition deadline, for the first time in years, is NOT EASY. So I delayed the moment for as long as possible. I spent hours looking at my old Dancers paintings. And I spent hours looking at photos of dancers online. And I spent hours looking for good deals on artist materials, online. And I spent hours mindlessly browsing Facebook… And then, about 2 months before the actual exhibition, I was left with little choice but to admit that I was as emotionally ready as I was ever going to be, get myself together and start working on my new paintings.

If I need to be honest though, my planning for making the actual art I wanted to exhibit really sucked. Whatever (or perhaps because of) my insecurities and emotional issues, I had put it last on my already long TO DO list and in the end I just got lucky because… by that time the concept of the exhibition had grown, we had some sponsors and a well known local artist called Svetlin Nenov, who paints dancers almost exclusively, had also agreed to participate in the show. Basically, we had decided that the best approach for this show was to promote it as my father’s exhibition, with the Grand Prix statuette central to the event, and Svetlin and me as supporting artists. I had never met Svetlin but having him exhibit with me took a lot of the pressure off.

I decided that realistically I could make 8 new paintings and exhibit 12 altogether, including the 4 old ones I already had. If Svetlin exhibited another 12 works, I figured, that would pretty much be enough to cover the walls of the gallery.

Luckily, I’ve always worked well under pressure and painting through the night (much to Michael’s displeasure) is my thing, so in the end I somehow pulled it all through. Admittedly, the first 2 paintings I made were not my best. I painted and repainted them, changed the compositions and colours over and over again. In the end I decided they were good enough to be exhibited… the next 2 worked out much better… By the time I started working on the final 4, I was starting to really enjoy myself. I had my process and ideas streamlined, I smiled at my blank canvases and played with the colours and textures. I finished the last painting (yeah, that’s me in front of it on the photo) about a week before my flight to Bulgaria, giving it just enough time to more or less dry before having to be shipped.

Once in London, we rented a nice 2 bedroom flat in Herne Hill. You know, the type of Victorian conversion flats often described as ‘spacious’ by estate agents… I don’t know about ‘spacious’ but the place seemed big enough for 2 people and I quickly turned the second bedroom into a home studio.

We loved the area. Just around the corner from Dulwich Village and 10 min on the train to Victoria station, it was, we thought, perfect! But then, I was faced with the question of ‘How do you go about organizing an exhibition in one country, while settling down in another?’. (Don’t know what I’m talking about? Read my first post bellow)

No matter how smooth your move to another country, there are still a thousand things (probably more) to find out about, learn and explore… London’s enormously big, I doubt I’ll ever really come to know every part of the city. In those first days we made countless trips to Oxford Street, some of the famous markets and of course IKEA, mostly buying furniture. It took months before we had the essential stuff, like chairs and a sofa, delivered. Luckily there was a bed in the flat… There was JUST NO WAY I could travel to Varna, find a gallery and organize everything there. But I had 2 very important reasons why I wanted this exhibition to take place there:

1. I wanted to involve my father in it, he was slowly recovering from serious surgery and I thought it was really important to get him to start working again. Most of you probably don’t know this, but my father’s one of Bulgaria’s leading sculptors, and is (I know he’s my father and all) but I honestly think he’s amazingly talented. At that time he had practically stopped working, so I figured, maybe if he started making art again, it would take his mind off the surgery and his ill health and help him recover faster…

2. It was a ballet competition, one of the most important ballet competitions in the world in fact, so what’s a better place to exhibit ballet themed paintings?

So I enlisted the help of my amazing cousin Aneta. She lives in Varna and had just set up her own PR and Event Management Agency, called Anettevents. On a personal level, she was also worried about my father’s condition… Besides that, being in charge of the PR of the International Ballet Competition was her first big project and she was ecstatic about the idea of organizing an additional cultural event around it. Initially, my father flatly refused to get involved. He was so out if it, and having an exhibition in another city (he lives in Sofia) meant that he would not only have to go back to the studio and explore his purely physical ability to create, a rather traumatic perspective already, but also travel to Varna – something he really, really wanted to avoid. However, as things started happening and he was offered to create the Special Grand Prix award for the Competition he kinda got excited about the whole thing. Meanwhile Aneta had managed to find the right gallery for the exhibition. The owner, upon hearing that he can host Ivan Minekov’s first exhibition in Varna, moved around his already set program of exhibitions to give us the 2-3 weeks during the competition. To be perfectly honest, this was the first time I realized that galleries have their programs arranged months in advance, or longer… Had this guy not known who my father was, and wanted to exhibit his works (within the framework of a big cultural event – an added bonus for the gallery), it would have been impossible to proceed with the exhibition. Ah, did I mention I wanted to figure out the intricacies of the art world?… This blog is starting to resemble a memoire but hey, I’ll hopefully get to the present in another few posts… so read on ;)

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.