The Heart of a Painting: The Mystery of the First Layer
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Teymur Daimi
Have you noticed how interesting it is to contemplate an artist’s unfinished work? For example, half-erased rock drawings from the Stone Age, or, say, works by Leonardo da Vinci, several of whose masterpieces have reached our times with only a first layer, without the Master’s finishing touches? You may agree that such a contemplation seems to take us into the artist’s studio to observe the intimate process of producing a painting from the very first stroke of a brush. It is as if lifting the veil from the artist’s creative impulse, previously hidden, perhaps in the way conjurers jealously guard the secrets of their “magic tricks”. Looking at such canvases, we are in the realm of incompleteness, implication. It is possible that the artist did not have time to complete the picture, or other circumstances intervened. But what if the artist consciously decides to show us a painting that is just begun? This is exactly what Azerbaijani artist Vugar Muradov, experienced and cherished in the international community of artists, is doing in his next project.
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