Bogdan Kravchenko

Bogdan Kravchenko is a contemporary landscape painter who has exhibited extensively in Florida as well as shown in Kansas City, New York, Los Angeles, and Kiev. His recent exhibitions include Yacht Club Fine Art Show in Fort Lauderdale, Red Dot Miami, Artist's Eye Gallery in Lake Worth with a first place exhibition prize, Hamptons Fine Art Fair, Los Angeles Art Show, and Vanessa Lacy Gallery in Kansas City. Bogdan has been critically published by AATONAU, Contemporary Art Curator Magazine, and Contemporary Art Collectors as well as featured in multiple catalogues by Saatchi Art. 

These paintings by Bogdan are not typical landscapes as they are portrayed with a great sense of orchestrated balance and refinement rather than captured in a raw sense of nature. Based on his own photography, the paintings reveal photographic tendencies in their geometric compositions and sense of heightened realism. Sometimes Bogdan incorporates abstractions, such as strips of colorful different angles of his subject, as if to reconfigure some of the paintings into a form of montage or collage. The paintings have a documentative approach but also seem quite theatrical in a way as if the setting was staged for a grand scene. 

With great symmetry, Bogdan typically portrays objects interacting with nature, symbolically representing human-created structures in relationships with the environment. These non-figurative works represent people through their modes of recreation, such as a boat, lifeguard post, surfboards, or even mailboxes on an open street. The paintings can be quite colorful but the imaginative hues are integrated with the realistic monochromatic tones in a way which offers immense balance, as opposed to improvisation. Finely tuned and refined, the paintings express individualism and yearning for wide open spaces, whatever they may entail. Bogdan’s variety in landscapes from the shore, swamps, farmland, to even urban settings, reflects a nuance of emotional impulses towards negative space compositionally and in forms of representation. 

Great Grey Mood (pictured above) captures an essence of Bogdan’s sense of eloquent balance. The slim white boat does not even appear representational, but rather similar to a strip of color streaked across the canvas. However on closer inspection, we will notice the realism in the boat’s detail and strategic placement with the tail end towards the pale open water and in a cross symmetrically towards the misty sky. The ‘T’ composition from both form and neutral tones from the boat to the aqua and air reveals a poetic inclination towards capturing a theatrical and appealing presentation, despite the monochromatic overtones of the swampy / marshy landscape.

Bogdan Kravchenko can be described as an artist in tune with his compositional prose. Like a composer, he amasses these great selective compositions which convey poetic and theatrical presentations of open land as well as shore. HIs approach to landscape, in both experimental form and refined realism, contains an investigative, documentative understanding of his surroundings which Bogdan describes as scenes beyond the comprehension of words. His locations may be difficult to describe, however they reveal a sense of heightened awareness of interaction between human-created structures and nature. The constructs represent humanity and our relationship with the forces of nature, Bogdan Kravchenko reveals the visual conversation these dramatic places enhance and alter our moods.

https://bokravchenko.com