User:Alexchereches

Alex Chereches

On July 26, 1944 in a small village called Aruncuta in Cluj Napoca, Transylvania, Romania, future artist Alex Chereches was born. Deeply fascinated by art from childhood, Alex created his first drawing using pencil and paper at the young age of five and by age seven he was producing color drawings. At age twenty-two in 1960 Alex imagined and painted his first oil on canvas.

In 1963, Alex graduated from High School of Cluj-Napoca and began restoring religious icons on glass. Hungry for knowledge, Alex aggressively pursued learning the technique of reverse painting on glass, a century’s old tradition invented in the Byzantine era and still used in Eastern Europe today.

Alex participated in various solo and group exhibits between 1977 and 1984 in the U.S.A., Canada, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland, Belgium, Holland, Bulgaria, and Venezuela, and received multiple awards for his Naïve paintings on glass.

Living conditions in Romania were extremely difficult under the rule of former Dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. The communist régime was so oppressive that Alex was prompted to request political asylum in the United States. In 1985 Alex immigrated to the U.S.A. with his beloved wife and son, and settled in Everett, Massachusetts.

In May of 1987, Alex moved his family to Morristown, New Jersey and accepted a job with a local grocery store.

After more than one year of living in a small cramped New Jersey apartment, Alex had lost his passion to paint and instead focused on his family and his job. Ultimately, he realized that paintings on glass, as beautiful as they are, would not become popular among the public.

In 1992 Alex and his family officially became United States Citizens.

n September 1999, ten years after Alex's abandonment of the art world, he rediscovered inspiration in the works of great European painters such as Pablo Picasso, Juan Gris, Joan Miro, Gino Severini, Wassily Kandinsky, Mandarin, Georges Braque, and the American abstract expressionists Jackson Pollock, Frank Stella, Arshile Gorki, and Willem De Kooning.

Alex had not previously paid mind to modern art, but a fascination sparked in him and he began exploring this wondrous world. Alex brought his brush back to life, this time making modern art his medium. "I love to create; it shows who I am and what I feel. It's a whole world of thought, dream, imagination and color on one simple canvas.  I want to share my work with people and see if it makes them feel the way I do.  My dream is to open an exhibition and show the world what I can do." Due to his one of a kind style, Alex Chereches is considered to be a "painter of international status" in the field of Fine Arts.

www.alexchereches.com cherechesalex@aol.com