Andrei Petrov

SANCTUARY - Large gestural abstract painting in shades of blue

Andrei Petrov is an American Artist of Russian origins. He lives and works in New York. Petrov states, "In my approach, two roads are taken: a natural, Hudson River School path of light and drama-filled grandeur that encounters energetically animated gestures, muscular surfaces, and bold strokes familiar in Abstract Expressionism. Beneath numerous glazes and opalescent layers swaths of paint dash about this stage and often emerge from the lower depths of which there are many levels. Freezing the action allows a probing slow-motion breakdown of the components that comprise the canvas. Think of a frozen lake: leaves, twigs, nuts, fish are all suspended in ice at different depths and angles. Piercing the surface, thick islets of paint interrupt a placid color field and create a vast nonlinear perspective from the root to the fruit of the gesture. Tension is created by the juxtaposition of animated bursts of paint with the slow contemplative layering found in paintings of the Hudson River School. The invitation to explore this amber-like world is now extended. Sometimes the brush is mightier than the pen."