Mihai Teodor Olteanu

I do not know who I am, but in all my beautiful dreams, since childhood, I dreamed of being a painter. And today my best dreams and my greatest desires are the same, namely, to become a painter. I’ll never dream of something more beautiful. I was born in Ludus (Middle Transylvania) on August 13, 1953. My father, a shuffle of movement, had a handwriting so beautiful that the writing machines of the age could have learned much from him. His talent for drawing and especially for writing has been demonstrated from 1956 to 1964, in the Communist prisons, where he copied poetries on the shoes’ wood soles. My first encounter with painting and with the image of God came early; I was about three years old when I went to my church with my grandmother to ask God to bring my father back. In those years I filled my eyes and my soul with the painted icons on the walls of the church on the hill, where I also had painted some when I was six years old. Soon, when I was almost nine, I visited the Ardeal Art Museum: in Cluj, the masters of the Romanian painting: Grigorescu, Luchian, Andreescu – in Sibiu, the world’s people: Rembrandt, El Greco. Andreescu gave me the melancholy, El Greco the dream of exaltation, to defeat sin through Art and Love, the dream of deliverance. Both of them have always remained in my heart as the masters of Eternity. When I was able to understand them, I became a painter. The years of the general school and those of the “Ion Andreescu” Institute of Art merged as sunflowers at the end of summer, leaving instead golden and young petals, the rust of the harvested wheat, the brandy mounds like the immortal pyramids of the windy autumn and melancholic. Because the colors of autumn have always fascinated me, its nuances gave me the feeling of fulfilling the calm, quiet silence, without strides or groans, but also the fear of not going too fast, of not cutting me off the branch before the harvest. more on mihaiteodorolteanu.art/about