What is your artistic singularity?
I’m still working with fine artistic practices like a painting, graffics depicting the local nature and it’s everyday scenery, balancing between the abstract and the concrete, using academic knowledge and combining them with the study of the technical possibilities of representing an artistic work.
How was it growing up in an artistic family? And what did you learn and appreciate from this creative environment?
What can I say, it was something very normal, my taste raised naturaly: I just watched my parents and brothers doing it all of them, and intuitively searched for my own method of creating an artistic object.
Tropic, 2017, oil painting, 120×120 cm
Looking back at your earlier works, what do you think about them today?
For me, my old works are more like a document of various periods of life, each of them is important and always interesting to come back and take a new look at this experience.
In your work you like to vary with textures, shapes and colours – what would you like to try and experiment with? What do you find difficult to capture with painting?
My artistic practice is intuitive so I don’t know exactly what I would try next, there is no special discomfort during the work, everything is relatively and often depends on the situation.
Blossom, 2015, oil painting, 150×180 cm
Can you tell us a bit about your serie “Antipodes”?
Antipodes is a series of graphic experiments inspired by wandering. The subject hold a balance between the landscape and the abstract vision of a particular location. The names of works, in fact, are not random numbers, they have a geographical latitude and longitude of the place where the work was created.
On the other hand, this project is a self-exploring. For a long time, my dominant practice was an experiment with painting, accompanied by a technological specificity of the material. Graphics is my new interest, more mobile, in my own texture, which allows me to explore deeply the boundaries of concret and abstract of the image at the same time.
How would you describe the recent artistic developments and trends in Ukraine?
The situation is specific, because in Ukrainian universities there is no special program for the study of contemporary art, which slows down the development of special institutions that would support the young artists and their projects. But maybe because of such difficulties, local artists find the power to make unique projects that represent Ukrainian culture in interesting ways.
Glib Franko on Singulart:https://www.singulart.com/en/artist/glib-franko-225
