Beautifully Ethereal Oil Paintings by Stanka Kordic

While watching my first CreativeLive video, Finding, Defining, and Marketing Your Photographic Style, I learned that we can find our own photographic style by emulating our favorite artists. We don’t copy them outright, rather, we analyze their work and think about what elements of theirs we can add to our photography. Teacher and fellow photographer Julia Kelleher challenged her class to find three sources of inspiration. These people can be painters, designers, digital artists or even other photographers. I racked my brain to come up with my top three. They would be Max Wanger (love his use of negative space), the late and great Rodney Smith (his compositions were impeccable) and Audrey Kawasaki (her oil paintings on wood panel take my breath away).

One of the artists that Kelleher is inspired by is Stanka Kordic. During all my time at My Modern Met, I had never heard of this painter before. As I looked through her body of work, I fell in love with her style. In particular, I love how she paints flower petals, they look like they’re swirling in the air. It’s almost as if you can see the wind. Her mother/daughter paintings are especially evocative. They remind me of the pure love a mother has for her child.

Here’s what Artist A Day On-line Magazine wrote about her work:
“Stanka Kordic’s collectors would say her work affects them on many levels. To see her entire body of work, the art critic may have trouble putting her into a specific category. Both would agree she is one our best modern painters. Neither traditional impressionism nor expressionism, nor figurative realism can be used to label Stanka Kordic. Her paintings speak for themselves, never nostalgic replications of by-gone days, but truly contemporary and magnificent examples of Modern Art rendered with the skill and passion of the Master’s traditions. Her paintings provide lasting pleasure as one is always delighted to find a previously undiscovered passage with each new glance.”