Surreal Procession (2006) Painting by Nicu Darastean

My childhood was very important for my development as an artist. I was born on April 2, 1971 in a small Romanian village surrounded by forests, a settlement where no modern facility had ever existed - not even electricity. I grew up imagining the “outside world”, making my own toys out of wood and clay, watching and studying nature. When I was 7 my family moved to a nearby larger village. There I started to broaden my horizons but at the same time lose my childhood. I started to discover civilization, as it was, and many times I had a feeling of “deja-vu”: seeing that things I had only imagined before actually existed.
I spent my teenage years preparing for a respectable career in electronics, but the influence of my grandfather, my first art teacher, a very good folk artist with an authentic aesthetic sense, was starting to come out. After high school I realized that I had to dedicate myself to the art of painting so I started to attend a local Graphic Art School. There I showed my professor a few paintings which looked so much like the works of Vasarely, Dali, Magritte and de Chirico that the professor asked me whether I had seen their works before. Having only read books about renaissance art and nothing about modern paintings, I started searching for information. Then I began my own art history course.
After studying graphic art I decided to expand my view of art by studying design. I chose design because the study of art was too constrained by the work methods of our art teachers. Unfortunately there is no surrealist art school in the world and surrealism is still overlooked by professors who are too busy with postmodernist art. Studying design helped me indirectly by developing my abilities of projecting a surrealist atmosphere through perspective and projective drawing and also making me familiar with new art techniques. During that time I perfected my watercolors, icons and graphic art style.
Traveling through the Netherlands in the last few years raised my interest for the hyperrealism of the still lives of Flemish painters. Then I began to study the fantastic realism of Breughel and Bosch, of Carel Willink and Pyke Koch and the metaphysics of Magritte and Delvaux. Learning from the experiences of other artists and adding my view of the world I developed, in time, my own surrealist style.

• Nationality: ROMANIA
• Date of birth : 1971
• Artistic domains:
• Groups: Romanian Contemporary Artists