Interview with Artist: AGNES BODOR

Hello Agnes, Thank you so much for joining the “Interview with Artist” series for our gallery blog. We are excited to have a chance to introduce you as an artist more deeply to our gallery visitors and collectors through this interview. I would love to ask you 7 questions about you and your art. Let’s start the first interview for 2019, shall we?

1.Please tell us a little bit about your background.
I am from Hungary. I learned painting in an art specialized high school in Budapest, but after that I went to an university and became a biologist and I received my PhD in neurobiology. Currently I am working at the Allen Institute for Brain Science as a neuroanatomist and using mostly an electron microscope for my work. On weekends and for my free time, I try to paint as much as possible.

2.Please describe your practice with a few words.
My favorite media are watercolor and ink. I like modern art when it is connected to real things, but I don’t have any preference in subject for what I paint, I like portrait, landscapes, still life, cats, basically anything. My method of painting is to allow the media to act by their nature, under my control. I like experimenting with new paints and papers and the ways I am working with them.

3.Who were your earliest influencers of famous artists or creators?
My drawing teacher in my highschool definitely had the biggest influence on me, his name was Zoltan Kiss.
Beside him, I have so many favorite artists that I only can list the tiny fraction of: many modern Chinese artists like Wu Guanzhong, Liu Kuo-Sung and Qi Baishi, the best portrait painter ever Lucian Freud, the great watercolorists John Singer Sargent, John Marin and the Hungarian Endre Penovac. As a mind of a painter, I feel Picasso very close to me. Overall, I like when artists capture the essence of their object.

4. Do you think your childhood inspires your artwork?
What’s your strongest memory of your childhood?
I do not get the inspiration from my childhood, or from inside. Rather it comes from outside, from the things I see, like the movement of cats, the light on their fur, a landscape, or face of a person. Because of that, I only can work, or at least the ideal way is to see the object of my inspiration during painting, in the case of cats at least a photo, since they are not tend to be a good sitter.

5.What generally inspire or influence you to create your work?
The visible world that I observe with my eyes; the light, the colors, the movements, the beauty of things, but I try to simplify them and concentrate the essence in my work.

6.What does your art mean to you?
Making is the best time in a day for me. I can forget about everything when I am creating work. The finished works are constantly occupying my thoughts because I putting them on my wall and looking them a lot and I am attached to them. I think it is the time when I am half consciously learning from my finished works, and in my mind I am starting to prepare for the next adventure.

7. Do you have any message to visitors for this exhibition?
Please Enjoy!

Thank you for reading the interview. The work of Agnes Bodor is on view until Thursday March 14, 2019. We look forward to have you at AG Gallery.