“Painting is a form of Utopia - a place (the object itself) and a time (spent in making it) where the world has a chance to be perfect. The painting is here, but what is represented on it is distanced, twice removed.

For me, it was always the past, not the future, that held most interest. The old is infinitely more mysterious than that which is yet to come. Armed with love of history and love for color and painterliness, I set out, over and over again, to make the most exquisite pictorial statements I am capable of creating.

Modernist and Post-modernist disdain for craftsmanship, beauty, and nostalgia is always a challenge. At some point in my career I decided to directly take on these very issues - craftsmanship, beauty, nostalgia, even sentimentality. Most of the images I work with are culled from the movies, old TV shows, old photographs of myself and the members of my family, and other sources I grew up with. Seen from the distance of time these images strike me as mysterious and poignant - the combination of sweetness and latent ominousness is the best.

After the image has come, I proceed to treat it in paint in various ways - I play with the conceptual significance of not only the image, but also, of what is done to it pictorially. I contend with spatial issues as they are seen in the traditional representation of the three dimensional image on the two dimensional surface. This I confront with the Modernist notion of flatness, as represented by transparent stripes, spills, glazings, etc. Affirming, denying, and again affirming, is of great interest to me.

In my view, painting is conceptually the most interesting and the most difficult form of visual art today precisely because of its long history - sometimes it is less troublesome to invent a new medium, than it is to find uses for an old one. It takes a long time to get good at painting - being a total believer, I am not willing to give up anything. My work is aiming to exist in the realm between passion and distancing - both are necessary". Miroslav Antic


Miroslav Antic, known nationally for his talent as a painter and for his teaching abilities, was born in Yugoslavia and received his training from the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. He served on the painting faculty at the Museum School of Fine Arts in Boston for over 20 years and has been an Armory faculty member since 2001. Recognition for his work includes a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant and a NEA New England Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, as well as a Florida Individual Fellowship in Visual Arts, and a South Florida Cultural Consortium Fellowship,.among numerous other awards.