William Michael Yenkevich

A Deep Passion For Poetic Feeling And Beauty

A lifetime of development as an artist, I paint in the Traditional Realist style using the academic approach of the Old Masters of the 15th thru the 19th centuries.

My ideal style is based on sound craftsmanship and techniques of the past combined with my own findings.

As an artist, as did the great masters of the past, the highest triumph an artist can achieve is the artistic genius of perfect reproduction of the subject represented with a deep passion of poetic feeling and beauty, ideal and superior in quality and craftsmanship.

I see only the beauty in art, and, for me, art is beautiful. I have accepted the infinite pains like the old masters in selecting and preparing methods, materials, and concepts in creating a painting. I deal with preconceived, clearly thought-out, well-designed pictorial projects. Every phase of the painting is developed almost according to a schedule and carried out to the highest perfection of form and the greatest clarity and luminosity of color.

I'm an artist endowed with a special nature, with a particular feeling for seeing form and color spontaneously, as a whole, in perfect harmony. The closer my work of art comes to perfection, the harder it is to pick out its merits because of the beauty of the whole being fused. My art is the negation of life's disorder and imperfection. It promotes order, clarity, pureness, perfection, and passion.

My painting's beauty is not created to express the real world but to replace it with a better one. The subjects I paint lose their insignificance in real life and become delicate objects full of grace, emotion, idiosyncrasy, and spiritual life. My work has no rejection of life but rather an amorous recreation of what exists, purified of everything that distorts it in reality and shows that everything that exists is elegant, refined, beautiful, and perfect.

The basis to great art is achieved when the elements of art - drawing, composition, modeling, perspective, design, and color - are brought together in unity to support, enhance, and intensify the artist's emotions.