Room 25

My atavistic fascination with ancient art has steered me towards The British Museum for years. There I hunt for objects that I find extraordinary in some sense and try to explore particular culture through its art.

I’ve drawn artefacts from early India, China, Assyria, Egypt before discovering Art of Benin - Age of an African Renaissance as I call it. Portraits busts from Ife and Benin are one of the most sophisticated in history.

I use watercolours because of zen like simplicity and transparency. I draw with brush then paint in layers, tentatively starting with faint traces of colours and gradually building up the details, shadow and light.

Interpreting art forms in media different from original poses a challenge but kings, queens, shamans and warriors from Benin come to life in watercolours with surprising ease.

Art that inspires me reflects on human odyssey on earth and choose concept of beauty and wonder to communicate, is concerned with essential not contemporary.

Uninhibited by pressures to conform as in contemporary art to deliver 'original' or intellectually encumbered work I am free to follow my drive.

I am committed to the idea that art should be used as tool for human evolution/education as was to explore 'space' which is close to us as our skin but our ordinary perception prevents its obviousness.

Why not commission a watercolour of your favourite artefact?

http://magazine.saatchionline.com/online-top-10/critics-choice/mishko_papic_saatchi_online_cr

"Watercolours are poised at the point between painting and drawing, between acting and thinking. John Ruskin’s watercolours of Venetian Gothic architecture are preemptive acts of romantic nostalgia, the medium’s own insubstantiality – fading in bright light, evaporating in strong heat, dissolving in a splash of water – somehow reflecting that of his subject. The portability and relative ease of watercolour painting makes it the flâneur-historian’s medium of choice. Like Ruskin’s, Mishko Papic’s watercolours are sometimes framed with scribbly notes and leaps of thought and thus have the quality, together, of a pre-war museum catalogue, the idiosyncratic inventory of the shuttered academic."

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