The Talent Around Us: Olga
When my portrait arrived from Zagreb I felt an enormous flash of excitement despite the fact that I had already seen the sketch before and had a fair clue as to how I might look with the oil applied to the canvas. Nobody has ever painted my portrait before, so I was curious what side of me might appear…
Olga, a great artist and a dear friend, has evidently captured the essence of my personality. The image she used while living overseas in Croatia was from a selfie photo that I had made a short while earlier while testing the capabilities of my new camera. I couldn’t come up with a better picture to give her for her project. I had great expectations for what Olga could create as I known for years that she is a highly talented artist. However, miraculously she took the best from the photo and transferred it into a picture displaying more facets than a photo can show.
Years of practice have polished her talent of representing people vividly in artwork. Olga truly has a penchant for producing great portraits. She realised her flair for art quite a while ago and now brings images to life in oil colours. It is always a great pleasure to look at those faces she has imbued with a classic beauty of gentle lines and pastel colours which smoothly curl into dark essential shades. I like the traditional elegance and high class of the images she makes, which are also full of lightness and energy. Seems that Olga captures the momentum of a person’s life, which can only be held by a canvas otherwise, it will fly away to continue on in an unknown direction. The people in her pictures look so alive it makes me hold my breath and watch for when they finally make a move…
All images painted by Olga are made in realistic genre. The idea of transmitting a simple beauty of things around us and to uncover and deliver the natural attraction in people’s faces, particularly women and children, is fascinates Olga greatly.
These roses in a vase is one of my favourite still life paintings of Olga’s. Every time I look at this picture I want to touch the roses and feel the silky tenderness of their petals. It is an image of a bouquet, but Olga can tell much more about it. Something like these flowers had been plucked in the early morning from a garden and not all of them fitted in the old, heavy, glittering vase. Perhaps whoever put them all together had changed their mind and determined to take the pink ones away and use their aromatic blossoms to make a scented sachet. The yellow roses are almost half-way through to opening their blossoms, but one of them has started to fade away and slowly come apart…
But what about this basket with its purple and blue display of natural beauty? Was a person enjoying reading a book somewhere outside earlier and decided to just pick some pansies on the way home? There is always a story behind every still life Olga captures.
Olga travels a lot and it really provides her with a great source of inspiration for her work. She has a fantastic ability to make a picture as the screen, through which you can observe different places in our world. I love viewing the realism and grandeur of landscapes through her eyes.
It’s always wonderful learning something new, but telling a story about such a professional talent does not give me much of a clue concerning where Olga could have developed her techniques. She continuously impresses in all genres. So, in the end I am just looking forward to seeing more glorious pictures of the world and the people around us from her artistic perspective…
