"Eighty percent of successful painting is composition. Quantity and discipline are not in conflict with beauty; they are how beauty is earned." · Atlanta, GA
Sergey
Cherep
Original Fine Art Catalog
Available Artwork
“Sergey Cherep's work is a vibrant celebration of color and light. A true Post-Impressionist, his thick, expressive brushstrokes and radiant colors transform everyday landscapes into something entirely magical. "My paintings are like fairy tales," he explains. "I try to bring a three-dimensional feeling out from the paintings by using color, perspective, and thick texture."”
— Sergey Cherep
The Process
Inside the Studio
THE PAINTING PROCESS
Sergey Cherep begins every painting long before paint touches canvas. He rises at 6:30 each morning and sketches — sometimes for hours, working through composition after composition until the structure feels right. He produces between 500 and 800 sketches a year, and from those, roughly 300 original canvases. For Sergey, the drawing is where the painting is decided. "Eighty percent of successful painting is composition," he says. Everything else follows from that. "My paintings are like fairy tales. A dream place. I don't see things as realistic — I allow the fantastic to happen." When the composition is set, Sergey moves to the canvas — and he starts in darkness. A black ground is laid down first, creating a deep, resonant base from which every color must fight its way forward. Working in oil and acrylic, he builds the image layer by layer, using bold primaries and heavy impasto applied with both brush and palette knife. The paint goes on thick — ridged, sculpted, almost architectural — so that the surface of the canvas becomes a landscape of its own, catching light and casting shadow in ways that shift as you move around the room. "I try to bring a three-dimensional feeling out from the paintings by using color, perspective, and thick texture." The result is unmistakably his. Sergey's palette radiates — deep cobalt skies, saturated fields of crimson and gold, birch trunks that glow against electric blues. The colors are deliberately unrealistic, pushed past observation into something felt rather than seen. It's a Post-Impressionist vision fired by the spirit of Van Gogh, but rooted in Sergey's own story — a man who grew up inside Soviet realism and painted his way out of it, one vivid, fearless canvas at a time. Anything can set a painting in motion: the quality of afternoon light, a grove of aspens turning gold, the scent of a vineyard, a color glimpsed in passing. Sergey doesn't wait for inspiration so much as stay permanently open to it — and when it arrives, he already has 6:30 AM's sketches waiting.
Where to Find the Work
