Ivan Bubentcov | Poetry of the Phallus
watercolor technique on thick paper, 41 x 40 cm, 2022, poster no war 30 x 20 cm

At the beginning of February, a beautiful gay couple from New York, Paul and Harry (now we are great friends), commissioned two paintings from me. Having seen my work in ‘Your Daily Male” and online subsequently; they expressed a great love for my parodies of famous works of art! The first piece is a parody of Salvador Dali.
Initially a pen and ink they decided that this topic should be developed and was realized as a water color. I call this pieces “Poetry of the phallus”.

As our friendship developed our mutual love of Dali resulted in a second parody work “Soft construction with boiled beans”. I posted the completed worked online to my various social media accounts and the warmth of the response was both positive and overwhelming. Coincidentally; an artist friend from Ukraine reminded me of a second name for the Dali original and asked me why I suddenly depicted a “Premonition of civil war”.

We paused for a moment thinking of this as clairvoyance. I didn’t know then that it would be true; two days later, the war with Ukraine began.