I am a Ukrainian-Irish artist living in Ireland for more than 20 years. All my life I have been engaged in art as a hobbyist. A few years ago I finally decided to dedicate all my time to art. Just then I started to develop my style with long tangled lines. The works of the Ukrainian artist – Ivan Marchuk – Irish – Jim Fitzpatrick – and American Jackson Pollock – had a big influence on me. My style is a combination of their styles: ‘drip and splash’ of Jackson Pollock, plyontanism of Ivan Marchuk, and Celtic art. Also, it is a combination of tangled threads of my mother’s knitted clothes and my father’s tangled fishing line which he tried to untangle for hours. It was influenced by both countries where I lived and their culture, and art such as Irish lace and Ukrainian embroidery. I named my style – tangled lines painting. What are tangled lines? It is a layering of thin long tangled impasto lines of paint, which create a 3d picture by tangling with each other. Tangled lines have their own special characteristic. The look of the paintings changes and you can see different effects from different distances and different angles as the lines create different shades of colour.
Ivan Marchuk creates a style called plyontanism and my style is somewhat similar to it, but when I wanted to recreate his style and I could not, then I figured out how to create an effect in my own way. That’s how my style was born and I didn’t know what to call it from the beginning. It took more than six months to improve the style and as a result of many attempts and failures, I managed to create my own formula for the paint and a special tool for its application. The paint is applied by a similar method used by the famous Jackson Pollock. The canvas is placed horizontally and the paint is poured in a thin line on the canvas, then given time for the first layer to dry and another layer of paint of a different color is applied.