George Dessev is a Fine Artist
“I have,” he says with emphasis. “In that direction I have excelled everything.”
If you purchase through our partner links, we get paid for the referral at no additional cost to you! Visit our disclosure page.
Listen to this gosh darn blog post aloud over at Medium.com.
And gives a big middle finger to Modernism
“I have,” he says with emphasis. “In that direction I have excelled everything.”
For George, painting is more about symbolism than anything else.
“Appliances or cars er (pause) I think they don’t have symbolism… Like a can of Coke has no symbolism. A cup has symbolism. A can doesn’t. For artistic purposes, if you put anything like that… just spoils your painting…”
I ask him if he knows what an NFT is and he replies, “Huh…What’s that?”
George is forty-eight years old, from Lafayette and drives into town almost every day to draw in coffee shops. He tells me his angle is “the coffee shop.” Since he was a teenager he’s been going there to learn art rather than a school.
The man sitting with me at OZO Coffee in Boulder, Colorado, is soft spoken and intelligent. In fact he’s so soft spoken I’m wondering if my recorder will pick up his voice over the funk music and the banging sounds the baristas are making behind the counter.
On this hot August day George is hunched over in a black t-shirt. His dark hair parted to the side. In the chair next to him is a weathered leather bag with a strap that makes him look like a professional when walking down the sidewalks of this town, but in his bag are pencils and paper.
He sold me two drawings for five bucks last week and I’ve been carrying them around in my laptop bag. We’d had a short conversation about visibility or how my blog doesn’t get any hits, like he wasn’t going to do the interview with me because of it.
I was introduced to him several years before Covid and saw some of his paintings hanging up at Avante Coffee on Walnut. He had nudes, which I thought were cool and something you don’t see often in Boulder.
Another time I saw his self-portrait, a striking painting, but something every famous painter has done, like Van Gogh for instance. George’s self-portrait looked similar to portraits from several hundred years ago, like you would see on the walls whenever you visit a well-known museum.
Dessev was thinking of subject matter no one knows about when he created his 36″ by 40″ art piece “The Funeral of Robin Hood,” which will be available for sale at The Trident Bookseller and CafĂ© at his month long hanging in September 2022.
George said about Little John in his painting, “He’s kind of a midget… Like Friar Tuck you can recognize.”
Also you can see minstrels singing about Robin Hood’s immortality in the furthest part of the picture.
There are several painters of note he’s studied with; Quang Ho and Ron Hicks at the Denver Art Students League.
His Show in September 2022
For the month of September George Dessev will have his paintings hung and for sale in The Trident Café at 940 Pearl St, Boulder, CO, 80302.
He does not have a website you can visit so you’re going to have to go over to the café yourself to see them all.
