The mother of someone I know sent in this review by Philip E. Bishop from the Orlando Sentinel of "Roots and Branches," a new show by a Florida painter we met at her daughter's home:
Victor Bokas has always been an artist of ebullient spirit, and his exhibition of recent work at the Maitland Art Center sparkles with new visual ideas.
Called "Roots and Branches," the show is inspired several times over. Many of the works are artistic meditations on Bokas' family and the idea of rootedness. The exhibition provides its own signboard in "Take One and Call Me in the Morning," an homage to Bokas' druggist father. He has used tablets and capsules to fill the neon outline of the sign on the family pharmacy in Gulf Breeze.The other inspiration was the artist's chance encounter with a blooming orchid tree, as Bokas explains in a catalog note. The tree's outline and extravagant colors merged in Bokas' imagination with a Chinese proverb --"Keep a green tree in your heart and perhaps a singing bird will come"-- and so we have a bird in a tree, the real heart of this show.Bokas is a graphic designer by day, and he transforms and elaborates his visual ideas with exuberant ingenuity. The orchid tree's florid silhouette, with a bird stenciled or attached at its center, is painted first as a positive, then as a negative image. It's reproduced in silk-screen prints and
painted 20 times over on large ceramic tiles. The array of painted tiles makes an especially handsome wall installation in the art center's main gallery.Bokas's work includes this mosaic at the Orlando International Airport.
His website: http://www.victorbokas.com.