The Artist

Tatjana Mirkov-Popovicki

Art Bio Artist Website

Tatjana discovered and fell in love with the Canadian Pacific North West in 1994, when she immigrated to Canada and made her home in Vancouver area, in BC. Her 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 her life, but in 1998 it was the time to get back to art. She took many classes and workshops in the Vancouver Art Academy over the following five years. In 2005 she has decided to pursue painting of Canadian Landscapes as her main subject which has inspired her immensely from her very first days in this amazing country.

Tatjana learned her art through education, self-study, and experimentation in a variety of directions, such as Portraiture, Still Life and even Iconography. She also loves plain air sketching to keep her inspiration fresh and mind open to learning.

Tatjana has been actively involved in the art community, especially through the Federation of Canadian Artists where she served as the President of the Board of Directors, and holds designation of a Senior Signature Artist and Honorable Lifetime Member.

Tatiana's work has been exhibited, collected and represented by several fine art galleries. Her paintings are hanging in many homes and venues in Canada, US and overseas, and are a part of collections such as Canadian Cancer Society and Canadian Cystic Fibrosis Foundation.

This great country stretches over 3,855,103 square miles of breathtaking landscape. Artists nibble at its incomprehensible vastness and bring morsels of beauty as our small present to the public. I am one of those painters, enchanted and humbled with this honorable task. I paint scenes of popular landmarks but also the hidden beauty of remote, hardly accessible locations.

Style wise, I bridge the traditional landscape subject with contemporary ideas, materials and techniques. My goal is to create visionary art that communicates textures, shapes, colors, and meaning of natural forms through harmonious patterns. In our vast wilderness, harmony is not always obvious or easy to find. There is always an element of something wild and dissonant that inspires the viewer, and needs to be recognized.

Philosophically, my thoughts take me beyond the "treeness" and "typical landscapeness" to the "beyondness" which I think is the essence of this country. That is something that I wasn't able to comprehend when I first immigrated to Canada – to the point that I wasn't really even seeing it. Coming from a part of world where the nature is tamed, beautified or destroyed, seeing wild things needed an entirely different perspective. If one is used to looking for pre-composed scenery, they will most likely miss the real treasure of Canada - oddness and abundance of things unexpected and stunning. The point of view needs to be readjusted to see and feel everything, from things subtle, to implausible, sometimes even frightening, like the effects of fog, the play of sun on the mountain slope, the doings of storms and forest fires, countless conditions that make up our landscape. It all composes itself into great surprising patterns which burn into our minds and hearts.

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 perpetual playfulness of 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.

Artist Statement

Exploration of the magnificent Canadian landscape in art famously began with the Group of Seven whose recognizable images have since become a source of the Canadian visual language.

With a modern outlook and renewed passion, Canadian Landscape is nowadays being revisited by a new generation of public.