Michael Dubina

ARTIST STATEMENT:The beauty of the Illinois landscape, with its expansive horizon that seems to stretch forever and a light quality that transcends the ordinary inspires me. My parents lived off the land in a small rural farming community in Nova Yshetsa in the Ukraine, where they cultivated wheat, potatoes, sunflowers, and corn. Upon immigrating to America during the Second World War, they chose the familiarity of the Midwest as their new home. My father who was a poet wrote and often spoke of the beauty of his homeland, which instilled in me a wonderful visual diary of images of the Ukraine forming the foundation for seeing the landscape through the eyes of a romanticist. I feel most compelled to paint while observing the birth of a thunderstorm as it rolls across the horizon, or a fiery sunset with daylight fading to dusk. The seasonal changes of spring, summer, winter, and fall provide me with an endless array of variations for oils and watercolors. One of my favorite motifs is the lone tree at dusk. In the Ukraine, the name "Dubina" stands for oak tree. I have always associated trees as a representation of the human figure but this added a more personal dimension. In the context of my paintings, the lone tree symbolizes my father who passed away in December of 1998. I call this tree the "Tato" tree, In the Ukraine "Tato" means papa or father. Whenever I see a lone tree in the landscape, it brings to mind memories of my father, Vasil Dubina.Watercolor Statement: I have chosen the Illinois landscape as my subject because I am entranced by its often overlooked qualities of quiet beauty and power, a power that seems to me both awesome and fragile. The puddling effects of watercolor, as well as powerful color contrasts, combined with a delicacy of marks and lines, makes watercolor an ideal medium for recording the drama of Midwestern landscapes. The honesty of the medium brings about a very personal interaction between the artist, the subject, and the work. In the spirit of a poet or composer, doing watercolors on this intimate scale has become my notebook of sorts, a visual diary allowing for spontaneous notation of color, emotion, and reverence.