What is the color of winter? It is predominantly white, although the air temperatures outside are high and not typical of February. The National Art Gallery-The Palace hosts an exhibition of Bulgarian artists dedicated to the coldest season entitled White: The Winter in the National Art Gallery’s Collection. It displays over fifty works of art. The oldest painting displayed at the exhibition was drawn by Asen Belkovski back in 1899 and the latest one was painted in 1985 by artist Nikola Nikolov. It is interesting to note that some of the paintings are displayed very rarely. What is the challenge to create your own work of art using the white color as the main color in your paintings? Here is what the keeper of National Art Gallery-the Palace Kiril Vasilev told Radio Bulgaria:

I must admit that this is a very difficult task. It is easy to create a picture with the whole range of colors available. However, it is extremely hard when you have to paint your pictures mainly in white. This technique requires a very fine sensitivity of nuances, because you are always exposed at the risk of creating a boring work of art. It is important to be able to create a feeling of dynamics and diversity using limited number of colors only. This is the main task of an artist who uses mainly the white color. Of course, we are talking mainly about winter landscapes. We showed works drawn at the end of the 19^th and the beginning of the 20^th century and ones made in the 1980’s. The exhibition contains paintings of some of Bulgaria’s most celebrated artists such as Yaroslav Veshin, Josef Pitter, Vasil Stoilov, Nikola Petrov and Zlatuy Boyadzhiev. The latest works were painted by Dimitar Hinkov and Milko Bozhkov.

In Kiril Vasilev’s view, unlike the paintings dedicated to the other three seasons which abound with various colors, the winter landscape allows artists to reach a bigger conventionality of the motifs they are interested in.

In winter landscapes we can only speak of contrasts between black and white colors. So, within these boundaries you have to present the whole diversity of nuances you work with. Of course, winter plots are not merely a formal task. You express a given emotional reaction depending on the landscape, the season, the color- the feeling created by the leafless forests and lonely figures. In other words, landscape painting enables us to examine the forms and at the same time express given emotional conditions.

In fact, there are few artists in the history of painting who show special interest in winter motifs or in the white color. Spring and autumn are our artists’ most-favorite seasons, because the surrounding landscape bristles with colors. The Bulgarian artists like warm and bright colors as a whole. Few artists such as Asen Belkovski and Atanas Mihov have a whole series of winter landscapes. Indeed, only two or three Bulgarian painters show special interest in winter landscape and the white color, Kiril Vasilev concludes.

English version: Kostadin Atanasov