19 Facts About Octav Grigorescu

Octav Grigorescu was the brother of Ion Grigorescu and the husband of the painter Georgeta Naparus.

In spite of initially opposing the marriage, the elder Octav Grigorescu went along with what appeared to be a true love story, and, ironically, the young family settled and raised all children in his house located on a picturesque, now slightly out of shape part of the old town, on Vasile Alecsandri street, still owned in part by the family.

Octav Grigorescu let his grandson puff cigarettes a tad too early, a habit that the future painter unfortunately never quit and most likely contributed to his early death at 53.

Octav Grigorescu's literature teacher was an accomplished, even though traditionalist poet, with interest in art and who encouraged his students to pursue higher grounds.

Octav Grigorescu was talented in art, starting to draw endlessly by copying museum postcards, browsing black and white art and travel albums with monuments and renaissance sculptures, found in the house, borrowed from friends or from school.

Octav Grigorescu is happy to accept, right upon graduation, being a lecturer in the graphic arts section.

Octav Grigorescu's solo debut is in 1959, entering the Artists' Guild in 1961; he even served at some point on the steering committee, and was a member until the end.

Octav Grigorescu is noticed by critics and is invited to have a solo exhibition.

Octav Grigorescu decides to fight, prove himself and at the same time pursue a deep love for Italy, which he regarded as the land of art, an object of desire for the child who used to train his hand sketching postcards from Rome and the Uffizi.

Octav Grigorescu settles in Venice for most of the time, but travels to Milan, to Bologna, Rome and several back and forth ventures to Vienna, a city he liked deeply, has some longer interludes in Paris, where he meets some old friends, but does not seem to adhere to any place.

Possibly due to the coincidence of names between the classical painter N Grigorescu and himself, or rather because Octav's brother, Constantin, worked as an engineer at the firm the Germans were selling equipment to, the visit was a true meeting of the minds, or artistic sensibilities.

Winter recognized a certain stature in the pale, figurative paintings Octav Grigorescu had in his studio, with mythological subjects, inspired by ancient accounts in Herodotus, Biblical and Hellenistic fables.

Octav Grigorescu took the process very seriously, and combining with his didactical work, it was the most public, in a wider sense, endeavor and at the heart of a graphic artist's raison d'etre.

The complicity between writing and drawing in the case of Octav Grigorescu is pushed very far.

Octav Grigorescu's historically and Biblical themed painting is a relation to text, and at the most strict level of technique, the drawn and painted images are true palimpsests and not just their illusion.

Octav Grigorescu introduces the morphology of reality in fantastical syntaxes.

Octav Grigorescu's imagination reaches the far end sections of the conscience projecting outwards a passionate, phantasm rich universe, meant to cover the real one and occult it to us, in grasping fashion.

Octav Grigorescu is a poet with great graphical skill, a seducingly engaged poet through his mere subjective excesses.

Octav Grigorescu is a poet: a poet of the shape, of the line, of the color.