Gene Tanta - Painting
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Gene Tanta is an artist/poet currently based in central Illinois, though he was born in Romania and emigrated to the US when he was 10. Attracted to writers and artists, he is exploring interconnections between idiomatic expressions and drawing and painting. That intersection between systemic conventions—between language and image, drawing and painting, memory and the imagination—continues to serve as a platform for inspecting the supple force he first felt as an 8 year old timidly uttering the word artist under a dictatorship in communist Romania.
Dislocation in slow-motion. That childlike zeal for exploring colors and shapes now drives his studio practice—manifesting as portraits, cairns, and wood-burning. Tanta received his MFA in Poetry from the Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop (2000) and PhD in Creative Writing from UW-Milwaukee (2009). He has served as Senior Fulbright Scholar to Romania with the University of Bucharest and just completed the Enos Park Residency for Visual Artists. |
