Dimitar Hinkov, born in Bulgaria in 1972, a contemporary artist who is living and working in Germany. He is a third-generation artist of his family, in fact, he started his first art at the age of 4 in his grandfather’s atelier. With the whole family’s artist background, Hinkov spent his childhood in artists studios and galleries, and fascinated by the work of arts ever since. Art then became Hinkov’s life and world, he finished his master’s degree in Art of Painting in 1998 at National Art Academy. Then in 2011, he received his PhD in Art at New Bulgarian University. At the age of 47, he has already accomplished over 50 solo and 72 group exhibitions internationally in galleries, museums, and private collections.
          

Hinkov has been focusing on creating his art with multiple materials, he likes to experiment arts with different materials such as acrylic, oil, pigment, resin and structure. He also does his work using different bases like canvas and metal. This technique of his is inspired by the ancient encaustic painting, encaustic painting technique would mix wax and resin and apply on the frame before doing any painting. This provides the painting base an amazing brightness and color saturation. But the mixture of wax and resin takes 3 to 4 months to harden completely, so every work that is done on these bases needs months of patience.
          

With the help of encaustic technique, Hinkov’s painting looks more like a 3D object, more towards realism. Every painting shows transparencies, depth and even textures just by looking at them. Hinkov’s purpose of painting is to explore the audience’s imagination toward his art, he wants people to think of their own narratives when looking at his work. Therefore, when Hinkov was painting portraits, he would purposely paint them in a way like they were damaged, either the texture of the portrait or the portrait itself. But he would save those important characteristics or details of the person that was being portrayed. This not only gives the portrait a mysterious feeling, but also left the audience some space to imagine.
 

Hinkov’s portraits fit perfectly with the theme of our portrait art gallery because they convey us many strong emotions, every portrait seems like they are telling a story. Because these portraits are not ordinarily perfect, they make the audience think and connect to themselves in their own way. Also, the color tones of these portraits are a mix of cool and warm colors, which fits the color tone of our theme. Every portrait has a great match of warm and cool color tones, and it’s very thought-provoking when people try to understand what emotions the portrait is trying to give out.
            

The first portrait is a warm undertone with a cool color tone on top, and it seems like there was a piece of plastic that damaged the paints of the portrait. But Hinkov drew these damages on purpose, this leaves the audience to think what the artist is trying to tell behind this portrait. The second portrait is more colorful than the previous one, it looks like there were some tape strings that taped in the middle of it, but the audience can see that this is an elegant lady in the portrait. Some people would say she was wearing a crown, but some might say she just tied her hair up, it’s all left for imagination. The third one painted with the similar technique of the second portrait but with more vivid colors, so it conveys the audience a happy feeling. The fourth portrait used all cool color tone, and the artist only painted one of this girl’s eyes. This one gives out a very depressing emotion, the audience would want to know why this girl has so much sadness in her eye. The fifth portrait used warm vivid colors, and the girl in the portrait expressed a strong feeling through her eyes; it seems like this girl has faith and ambition to her life or goals, and it conveys that feeling to the audience too. The last portrait is made of a bunch of warm and cool squared pieces, the initial feeling towards this portrait may depend on the mood of the audience because it gives out lots of emotions and it’s complicated to pick out just a single one of them.