Slav Nedev
Peripheral ARTeries
an interview with
Slav Nedev Hello Slav, and welcome to Peripheral ARTeries. I would start this interview with my usual introductory question: what in your opinion defines a work of Art?
Hello and thank you for your question!... A question that probably has as many answers as there are people on this planet. However I will try to share some thoughts about it without giving a strict definition. Of course a work of art should be an outcome of certain human activity or the activity itself. But what is the difference between any other product and activity that we don’t recognize as works of art? It happened to me recently to watch a short film about a diamond cutting factory in Botswana. The guide, a company’s employee, has shown to the camera a cut diamond and a diamond simulant made of cubic zirconia and explained that both “practically look alike and yet they are not the same”. Well, it is the same with art. There is something volatile that distinguishes a true work of art from any other work. That’s why paradoxically the most important think in a visual work of art is actually invisible. Another important quality of any work of art is its authenticity – meaning that a work of art conveys (in a specific way, through vision, words, sound etc.) an authentic state of mind and somehow reaches the audience that is normally open and prepared to accept it. A “state of mind” should be taken here in a broadest sense, not only as feeling or thought or purely mental condition but rather as a synthesis of psychic and physical, of personal and collective. So, it seems Art is about communication (it always needs to reach someone) but communication of special things: experience/awareness of our own entirety (totalness?) and our unity with the world/being.
Slav Nedev in his working room
Photo by
drawing courses, but you are basically a self-taught artist, so I would ask you what's your point about formal training... I sometimes happen to ask to myself is a certain kind of formal training could even stifle an artist's creativity...
Would you like to tell us something about your background? Are there particular experiences that have impacted on the way you produce your artworks? As I can read in your bio, you never entered the National Art Academy in Bulgaria, your native country: you later attended private
I was born in the sixties in Sofia in a family of engineers. I need to say we had in our home a huge library with books of any kind including art albums as well as a largeHanks collection of vinyl reCassandra 66