O-A: What is art to you? Is creating an urge, necessity or maybe an incontournable, essential way of life?
Tanya Angelova: Art has been part of my life from the very beginning. I graduated from an arts high school and then from the Academy of Fine Arts.
Art is my way of life and the abstract is my way of expression.
The idea of the abstract is what draws attention to philosophical reasoning and universal truths that carry the message and footprints of human action.
O-A:What wouldn’t you do without art? What did you discover, achieve whit it?
Tanya Angelova: As an artist of gesture and fabric, using the brush and the spatula, the needle and the thread, all engrossed in the mystery of the transparency of raw silk, I pierce the surface of the canvas – stitch after stitch – I sew down my thoughts and emotions.
Sewing is a gesture of the feminine principle.
The thread that has a beginning and an end – just like everything in this world.
The thread – a symbol of creation.
All of this, taken together, is me.
The fabric and the image give way to gestures and symbols.
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O-A: If a person, artist or not, influenced you, what kind of question would you ask him/her?
Tanya Angelova: The way of thinking, and not the way of doing, guides me.
That is why there is no favorite person I can name….. there are thoughts and ideas that are close to me.
For example-
Gerhard Richter says: “All landscapes are ultimately abstract paintings”.
Or H. Matisse – “Learn, so that it would be easier to unlearn. Master, in order to free yourself.”
Or Kiki Smith – “All the history of the world resides within your body.”
I understand that, these ideas are close to me.
I don’t need to ask them questions. Such is my philosophy.
I find exciting intelligent esthetics. I am not interested in the circumstances of the specific. The details speak of another habitat and of another viewpoint.
The seasons as change
The motion of time
Transience as the spirit of the matter.
O-A: What is a vivid memory of a remark concerning your art that got stuck with you? What was the most interesting statement you heard about your work?
Tanya Angelova: A gallery owner once said to me: “Leave this series aside to settle for a while, the public is not yet ready to understand it. ”
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O-A: How do you search for inspiration and themes for your work?
Tanya Angelova: “Where do I start, with what do I end?”
The trace is the key element that holds together my approach to art. First, there are the traces in one’s memory that create configurations of what is left of the moments lived, the places visited, and the faces encountered. Then there is the trace as a drawn line, a dash, a chromatic element or a plastic fragment. The themes in my works accentuate the inner reflection of the world experienced outwardly. It is a conception that hovers between the abstract and the figurative, just like the stuff memories are made of.
Everything in nature is subject to transformation, and so is the search.
“In creating, I am inspired by the desire to transform, confront and mix different fabrics and materials. I sew the canvas in order to assert my presence, as an emotional gesture.”
To go further, I ask “only” to be my truest self. This transformation is everyone’s quest.
. …. An improvisation which brings back and fuses the classic approach and the alternative approach, thus manifesting the tendency to blur the lines among the different genres.
Focused on a problem of expression, basically how to explore the plastic element beyond its representation by recognizable shapes.
The Abstract is my universe, the universal language.
A new way of addressing my feminine side.
Questioning – the limits of the observable, of the world’s presence, of the way of inhabiting it.
O-A: Why? What names do you give your artworks?
Tanya Angelova: I work in series and the name I give to the series is not that important to me. Naming an abstract emotion doesn’t much matter to me. Everyone is free to get their bearings within themselves and to call the image as they see fit.
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O-A: What do you usually talk about with your collectors?
Tanya Angelova: Tanya Angelova: With collectors we talk about gesture, emotion, structure, and the power of minimalist expression. That black is the absence of color in the color-spectrum. The colorless hue. And at the same time it symbolizes the absence that is present or perhaps the presence that is absent.
The themes are philosophical, esthetic.
That the spectator has a hard time determining whether it was a man or a woman who created the work – in an expressive and energetic masculine way, or in a precise and warm feminine way, exuding comfort (via sewing, embroidery with thread).
The good thing about the abstract is that each person can seek and discover their own thoughts and interpretations, related to their own emotions and experiences. I only encourage the person (the collector) to find himself or herself in my works.
