Klementina Mancheva was born in 1982 in the town of Yambol. In 2001 he graduated fine arts at Yambol High School “Vasil Levski”. Between 2001 and 2007 she graduated as Bachelor in Fashion Design and Master in Graphic and Spatial Design at NBU Sofia. In 2012, he decided to devote himself to painting, preferring watercolor as a means of expression. Here’s what she says about drawing and why she’s dedicated to art.
Drawing is like sickness, like mania, as an escape, as a secret room in which you are hiding. I suppose every artist will recognize it in one form or another, but the point will be this one. If I say I’ve always used this emergency exit I’ll lie. In the period when my children were born and became conscious enough to understand when Mom was to be left alone I was deprived of it. Children are the same element as art, wanting to give them up to “get”, shuffling and imitation of attention are not appropriate.
The painting I chose (or vice versa) in the fourth grade, fortunately I came to the best teacher and a person who still can imagine today – Andon Topchiev. I do not know how he was able to harness us to paint hard, to explain to us at the same time perspective, color science, composition, and between inserting stories from his childhood to make us laugh. He told us how with colleagues from the Academy they had gathered money to buy albums with reproductions of paintings, how he got in the second time, how his mother did not let him learn painting because the artists were either crazy or drunkards. And more and more. The atmosphere in the atelier was very comradely and creative, and this atmosphere did not create any more – neither in high school nor in university. He infects us with art, this is my first and most important teacher, and I will always be grateful for that.
Then impressively impressed the Impressionists and especially Toulouse Lothreck. I am still very, very fond of both my paintings and my imperfection. From Bulgarian artists I like Stoyan Venev very much, both with his landscapes and with his erotic and naive paintings and drawings. But maybe Ivan Milev is the Bulgarian artist who touches me most, perhaps the unshakable sadness in his paintings is the reason for that.
I think that every person who deals with art (and this applies especially to Bulgaria) has his own, inner and, above all, unshakable reason to do so. Fighting with matter, personal fears about personal creativity, sales, the economic environment, and the insecurity that accompanies all this.
Everything is a big unknown, starting with whether you will be able to find quality materials, whether you can do something with them, and whether you can make it happen on the market. But all this is like an additional stimulus that does not give you to give up, but on the contrary. Of stubbornness and despite being motivated to prove that things can happen.
