Oleg Osipoff

Winter to summer, 2022

 

As a painter of representational images, I root my art to the visible world. My subjects are the landscapes I have seen many times and are part of my daily life, which I select not for their outward beauty, but for their potential to become so. They are subjects I have developed an affinity toward because they compel me to observe more closely and to find intrinsic arrangements within them that I might otherwise miss. My objective is not to represent them as my eyes sees them, but to exploit their form to introduce colors, shapes, textures, and details that I have found and imagined, that together can create a unique and poetic dynamic.

My formal training in art to the level of Masters, as well as visual intuition developed over decades of painting experience, give me the tools by which to express what I feel about place. Artist influences are important, and mine have included Richard Diebenkorn, about whom his biographer, Timothy Anglin Burgard, in the SFMoMa catalog “The Berkeley Years,” stated that “for Dick, place is paramount.” I am responsible to my physical environment in the same way, recognizing it as the “aura of a place” that, for me, has the particulars of landscape, cityscape, color and weather, that are unique to San Francisco.

One of my favorite quotes about art comes from the American writer William S. Burroughs, who said, “It is the function of the artist to evoke the experience of surprised recognition: to show the viewer what he knows but does not know that he knows.” I paint what I find in the everyday that still holds surprise and satisfaction on its own, and not just a section of a larger panorama of a city.

– Oleg Osipoff

See more of Mr. Osipoff’s work at www.olegosipoff.com.