Artist: Nedko Solakov
Exhibition title: Color Stories
Venue: Dvir Gallery, Brussels, Belgium
Date: March 25 – May 13, 2017
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Dvir Gallery, Brussels
For quite some time I have resisted making watercolours again. My last proper ones were done some twenty years ago. Meanwhile, I more or less mastered my relatively well-known “sepia, black and white ink, and wash on 850-gram paper” drawings, which in general were produced in series containing 7, 9, 12 and even up to 99 and 123 works. I made thousands. And then, just like that, in late October 2016, I put some protective white sheets on my second table, which I always kept clean, placed a jar of water on it, dug out my old watercolour brushes and paints, and just started painting on the same heavy paper. It was a kind of revelation when I again discovered the obvious – that the colour adds a dimension which I could not achieve with the ink, even though sometimes the sepia, black and white, and wash give the sense of polychromy. And then, step by step, story by story, colour after colour – or rather, on top of each other – the “Stories in Colour” came to light. Some of the stories are still a bit sad and perhaps not so optimistic, and my sense of humour may have become more like a middle-aged man’s as well, which in my case means more childish. Which is okay, I guess.
Nedko Solakov, February 2017
