Artist Statement

Vilian Montage


I’m a painter   Sometimes with Oil.  Sometimes watercolor.  And on occasion with ink and markers.  The subjects are almost always people.  And with my Art, extracting a person from the crowd and creating some sort of story or emotion has always been the goal.  When I began….. the references were usually from one of my own street photographs.  Paintings of people I didn’t and would almost certainly never meet, or get to know.  So, with those images I was forced to, as indicated earlier, extract the individuals from the crowd, and in doing so, create my own sense of who they might be, or what they might be experiencing at the time.  However, as I got more involved with social media (Instagram, in particular) many of those faces became real people to me.  And while I didn’t really know them in the beginning, I’d at least have some idea of how they wanted themselves projected.  Their own STORY, if you will.

All that said, I’m still able to find stories hidden within my own “street” photographs, but have become far more reliant on the people I’ve met in the world of Social Media.  Most of them, just in passing, but a few, having a deeper understanding of them as individuals.  Acquaintances.  And yes, sometimes friends.

That’s WHAT I find myself painting the majority of the time.

The WHY, as you might imagine, has to do with my lifelong interest in what motivates; inspires; disturbs; frightens; and makes happy or sad, the people I come in contact with.  Extracting them from the crowd and seeing them as individuals.  For me, there’s a story in just about every one of my paintings.  My hope, is that whether it’s a narrative or a portrait, you’ll somehow, find in the painting, a story of your own.


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