Tatjana Mirkov-Popovicki

New Beginnings Framed Acrylic 12 x 16	Coal Harbor (Sunset) Framed Acrylic - 20 x 16	Granville Market Framed Acrylic - 18 x 24
Coal Harbor View Framed Acrylic - 20 x 16	The Holy Trinity Icon on Wood	Lighthouse (West Vancouver) Framed Acrylic - 12 x 16

Tatjana Mirkov-Popovicki | Biography

I discovered and fell in love with Canadian Pacific North West in 1994, when I immigrated to Canada and made my home in Vancouver area, in BC

My childhood in a small charming mid-European town overlooking river Danube was filled with reading and drawing. The years of growing up, however, took a direction of science, ending up with a Bachelor's Degree in Electrical Engineering.

Immigration to Canada and a career in technology took a significant part of my life. After many years of my internal artist being bottled up, it was the high time for the "real me" to get unleashed. I took intensive art training in the Vancouver Art Academy from 1998 to 2002, which opened up the magical door of art to me.

I joined the Federation of Canadian Artists in 2002 and became actively involved in the art community. After several years of serving on the FCA Board of Directors, I have been elected the President in 2008. I am a senior member of the Canadian Institute of Portrait Artists since 2005 and a senior member of the FCA since 2009. My work has been exhibited and collected since 2002.

In my art, I explore the past and present worlds and connections between them.

While painting a landscape, my goal is to record, overstate and interpret what I find especially beautiful, in my own way. I like to use a variety of tools to express my ideas: emphasized brushwork, color dissonance and harmony, directive linear elements, variations in the texture of the paint. This variety relates to the abundance of varieties found in the nature. Landscape is a strong and humbling subject; it often resists being captured on a piece of canvas and it plays many tricks with the artist. We can never win, but only take what the landscape agrees to give, and supplement the rest with our own imagination.

In my portraits, I explore the world of timeless values, beauty of the human body, landscape of the face. I take a long time to create these images, savoring their emergence from hundreds of thin layers of graphite, crayon or watercolor. Only natural materials are used - earthy pigments, rug paper, crayon made from clay, charcoal and graphite. Thanks to my beautiful models, these paintings carry messages sent from the ancient times to the today’s world. The messages hidden in shapes and gestures of the body, symbolic meanings of colors, reminders of stories passed on from our ancestors.

The road of art is long , and the journey is full of delights. For all this happiness I thank my best friend, my supporter, my mentor, my model, my great love forever, my husband Sinisa.

My paintings are an invitation to you to share the joy of art.