Express and Repeat
Revisiting the year’s visual arts: Dushko Petrovich at Sherman Gallery
Watch the slide show above to learn more about Dushko Petrovich’s painting style. Photos by Kimberly Cornuelle
Some pieces hang in a museum for centuries, others never make it out of a studio. Some reside on stretched canvas, others on an urban wall. Some rely on paint, others on electrons. But all good art deserves more than one good look. So this week, we’re resurrecting some of our arts coverage from the academic year just concluded, offering one a day — vitamins for the spirit.
An open jaw, a sphinx, and a flower. These images appear again and again in Dushko Petrovich’s watercolors and oil paintings, which were isplayed in a solo exhibition at the Sherman Gallery in November.
“Most of my ideas come from working on a particular image over and over,” says Petrovich (CFA’06), the founding editor of Paper Monument, a contemporary art journal, and a past artist in residence at the Royal Academy in London. “There aren’t many ideas that are external to the work.”
Petrovich, a graduate painting fellow at the College of Fine Arts, first gravitated to the images while working on a translation of poems by Italian poet Eugenio Montale. He began creating paintings to accompany the poems, and five images stuck — a horse, a landscape, a sphinx, a flower, and a jaw. During the last year, he has focused on the flower, the sphinx, and the jaw.
“For me, there are things that can only be expressed through painting,” says Petrovich. “If I could express them in words, I wouldn’t have to paint. I don’t really have a choice.”
This article originally ran November 11, 2008.
Kimberly Cornuelle can be reached at kcornuel@bu.edu.
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