Girls, Summer, Guns: Realistic Paintings on Wood by Andrew Valko

Hyperrealism is a very difficult style of painting. It requires talent and high skill from the artist. Canadian artist Andrew Valko has all of this in abundance, his paintings convey not only scenes, but also mood. (Caution! Nude).

Andrew Valko was born in 1957 in socialist Czechoslovakia. He loved to draw since childhood, but who knows how the fate of his talent would have turned out if not for emigration. In 1968, Andrew's family managed to leave for Canada, to Winnipeg, where the artist lives and works to this day.

Valko does not paint his pictures on canvas or paper. The basis of his canvases is wooden boards. The artist uses acrylic paints, which are great for hyperrealistic works. His second specialty is engravings. Andrew Valko is well known not only in Canada and the USA, but also in Europe and even Asia. His paintings sell well and many famous collectors want to get their hands on them.

Over nearly 20 years of exhibitions, his work has been collected and exhibited by many public institutions and private collectors in Canada and abroad, including the Winnipeg Art Gallery, the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, the Brockton Art Gallery, Boston, the Canada Council Art Bank, and the Claridge Collection, Montreal. In December 1994, Andrew Walko was elected to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts.

The artist chose two directions for himself - portrait and everyday scenes. Girls in Valko's paintings are almost always in bathing suits, underwear or naked. In his scenes there is a lot of sun and warmth, beautiful naked bodies, and also, for some reason, pistols.

Valko is constantly improving and learning. As an adult, he studied woodblock printing in Japan with master engraver Toshi Yoshida. After that, his works began to have obvious Japanese motifs. Valko was included in several prestigious exhibitions. Among them was the annual international exhibition of Yoshida's prints from 1987 to 1994 in Tokyo, Japan.

Another great hyperrealist artist whose works are definitely worth checking out is Omar Ortiz from Mexico. What do you think of realistic paintings?