Pepa
Pepa (Russia)
An interview: What in your opinion defines a work of art? And what caused you to become an artist? In my opinion a work of art reflects the energy that you feel standing by the work, the energy which an artist puts in his or her work and in many cases itґs not important what is painted but you feel some magnetism and mystery and you can't help looking at this work of art because it is sincere and there is no lies, it expresses true feelings and life of the artist. That is why it is not so difficult to define what is really a great work of art or what is not. Energy defines everything! I think there is no cause to become an artist, you are just born to be one but sometimes you need to pass certain life stages to understand this like did Van Gogh, Wassily Kandinsky, Frida Khalo, Paul Gauguin and many others to have what to tell the world. As we can read in your CV, you have a formal training: do you think that artists with a formal education have an ad-vantage over self-taught artists? On the contrary, I am rather a self-taught artist. But I think that artists with a formal education have an advantage over self-taught artist because they know technics how to express this or that but the problem is that nowadays there are fewer and fewer real artists (most of them are superficial and I even can’t call them artists). Yes, this people studied drawing and painting, they know perfectly different technics but they donґt have anything to express, they can paint
Pepa
and draw perfectly, their works are correct compositionally but their works are empty. As the great Russian artist Vasily Perov said "Of course, nobody would consider only the reflection of the exterior, even perfectly executed, as true art. Unfortunately, the public, amateurs, and sometimes even the artists themselves are greedy for these lures. Often they admire some hat painted so naturally that you want to spit on it!" I think it is not enough to be just a self-taught artist, this must be some kind of base for the ar-
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