About
I have been a full-time artist based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania for more than 20 years.
Professionally trained, I hold a four-year certificate from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art — America's oldest museum and art school. I have also spent three years working in-studio with renowned artist Osvaldo Romberg.
My educational background comes with diploma from Repin College of Art from Chisinau Moldova 1988-1991, Certificate Program at Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art 1994 – 1998 and “ The Studio “ with Osvaldo Romberg 2002 – 2004.
For the last 10 years I am working predominantly in the genre of Abstract Landscape.
Using a traditional oil paint and painting support as Canvas is important as a connection with Pictorial Tradition and as one of the elements to identify myself as an Artist (at list for myself).
Pallet knife as a tool of applying paint give a certain amount of control over painting process. Also, there is a quite significant element of Pleasure in the spreading, scraping, applying, and reapplying, molding and transforming Paint in to Painting. Oil and Cold Encaustic over Acrylic is a technique personally developed and best suited to my artistic goals and temperament.
It is very difficult to create an abstract painting that is not an imitation of the often-glorified imagery of drips, pours, stains and other visual clichés. Instead, it requires developing a personal and individual painting style, which is a never-ending process.
Ruslan Khais: The Palette Knife Poet
The Moldovan - born veteran visual artist Ruslan Khais is a self described painter of abstract landscapes, that constantly skirts the boundary line between representation and pure abstraction…
As a visual artist I view his work as visual poetry, for me the early many – limbed painted figures, look as if they are dancing in an open air night club that never closes, on an undiscovered planet, but it’s a club you can get in, only if your cloths are off.
Ruslan’s’ gestural abstractions interest me the most, I guess that is because his palette is bright and dark, his palette knife loaded, like a gun you can hear go off yet the silencer on!
He builds up the surface with thick rainbows of wind - torn flags, that move across the canvas like acrylic surf boards, that will not return to the beach until after the philistines have gone. The images he creates, speak in tongues of color theory, on his canvas - church revival.
The economy of his marks may not be in your aesthetic budget. But if you are willing, and invested as a viewer, to learn a new language, you will be the richer, with a stock that will never crash.
Theodore A. Harris
Visual artist and Poet
Philadelphia, PA
2020-02-08