Tell a little bit about how you first got into creating art.
There was this primary school art teacher, a great watercolourist as I discovered later on, who found a way to discipline some of his more restless pupils (both of us actually) by locking us up after school in his study full of various art books. Flipping pages and pages of strangely beautiful pictures revealed a new, yet unseen world and started an insatiable hunger for discovering things of beauty and wonder in most unlikely places. Despite my teacher's efforts, I never managed to learn traditional artistic skills like drawing and painting, but he managed to show us other ways to express ourselves and was prepared to provoke and support our efforts, no matter how inept they may have been at the time.
...in fact there are only two starting points of any of my artworks, a single photograph or a line of code
What artists or movements have had an impact on you?
This may sound difficult to believe, but just about every single artist I meet in person is a source of great inspiration to me. And not only artists, every person passionate about one's own work. Yours truly is one lucky bastard who gets to photodocument International Fine Art Symposium called Slovenia Open To Art every year since 2012. And I can't even begin to tell you how much I enjoy every single moment of it. Observing artists creating art in front of my very eyes makes me ever so grateful for this incredible opportunity. And almost without noticing I learn a lot more than I could ever hope for and even get to learn a few tricks and steal some ideas in the process. Of course, there are many artists I don't know in person whose work I love and admire, but there are just too many to mention.
...when I look at my own work at the exhibition I enjoy it all over again analyzing, deconstructing and rediscovering all the details new to me
What themes does your work involve?
The human condition. Manifested through portraiture, urban landscape, geometric and abstract art quite so often more or less recognizably mixed in a single digital collage.
What is important to you about the visual experiences you create?
One's own story a viewer discovers while looking at my artwork.
What is the significance of medium and color?
Since my artworks are created digitally, most of the time they get printed on canvas and stretched. For strictly practical reasons, there's not much choice of print media, but that's ok. As for color, every artist has a personal palette which may change over time. The very process of digital collage tends to go full spectrum quite early in the process, making this palette less obvious, but it's always there. On the other hand, a lot of my pieces and not only photographs tend to turn black and white. Guess this shows a strong influence of traditional photography.
Do you work from memory, life, photographs, or from other resources? Describe your creative process.
Depends. But in fact there are only two starting points of any of my artworks, a single photograph or a line of code. I do not consider myself a photographer, well at least not a photographer's photographer, since I am essentially an image collector. For me, a camera is a tool for harvesting images, almost unconsciously. Camera to me is what a pencil and a sketchpad for a painter. Most of the time those images are just putting on a side, waiting to be rediscovered sometimes even years after being taken. And then one day one of them calls out to me and the process begins. It may be just a simple cropping and a black&white conversion. But more often it's a start of a digital collage, which may involve not only my own photos but also imagery found in public sources and quite so often a piece or two of digitally generated graphics. Or even one of my own finished works, which makes me a very eco-friendly art-recycling artist. Sometimes there's a vague idea of where I want to go with this collage, but usually the final artwork makes itself using me as its own tool of self-production. So when I look at my own work at the exhibition I enjoy it all over again analyzing, deconstructing and rediscovering all the details new to me. Still, ever since I became aware of this urge to create art, there was this nagging voice in my ear nudging me towards discovery of that last little bit of whatever that could be considered as an art piece.
What is your favorite art accident? Did it change your perspective?
Strictly speaking, every one of my artworks in an accident ;-))
Do you have any artistic goals for the future that you would like to share?
A number of projects spanning several years are being updated, worked on, despaired over, diched, rediscovered, frowned upon, being excited about, ripening, ... all the time. So there's new work being created every day, but it may spend a lot of time facing wall (figuratively speaking), in exactly the same way some painters treat their works, until it's either ditched, recycled or finally put in front of the audience. And maybe someone in that audience will recognize the tune it plays.
What do you consider the role of an artist today?
The same as ever, to be a witness of one's time, always a critic, sometimes a prophet...
