„I am an earthling”


My name is Igor Eugene Prokop, I was born on 13 July 1953 in Budapest and I still live in Hungary, in Visegrád.
I come from a family of doctors and had a wonderful childhood. My globetrotter grandfather has been the most significant idol for me in the family legendry. I am Hungarian but my art cannot be restricted by geographical boundaries. I have drawn on the natural beauties and cultural heritage of my own country but the isles of New Zealand and Oceania have had at least such an effect on me. I am homesick being away but I do not know which my real home is, and I am always longing back again and again. I am an earthling.
I have traveled round the world and know: it is small and fragile! I can see this from 11.000 meters above but the cavalcade of the same magic can be experienced through a microscope. My sources are being on the road, observing and painting off the experiences imbued and seeing them revived on the canvas.

I love the sea, the grass o the meadows, animals, and the animate and inanimate world. The material. Do I happen to be a narrow-minded materialist? No, definitely not. The spirit is non-material but the material is the worldly realization of the spirit. As a dental technician I had to melt metal, make moulds from wax, plaster of Paris and porcelain and I got enchanted by the multitude of opportunities hidden in the material. I learnt Biology and drawing and wandered around the world. I devoured beauty, the wonders of nature, got to know men and myself. I perceive the world through the eyes of a scientist and an artist and try to interpret and reproduce it. I have a colorful vivid mosaic of it and I attempt to systematize it in order to create a new picture of it, my own image of the world. Nature is the greatest wonder of God – perhaps God himself – and my own style: Pro Bio Art (Prokop, Biology, Art) is built around it.
Its essence is a kind of complexity: the introduction of the world perceived as a biologist and the application of traditional and brand new technologies. Starting from traditional painting (oil –painting, graphics) I have arrived at DOT ART, a kind of microscopic art creating micro worlds. It is completed by Bio fusing art – melted glass technology - and it consummates in Brass Blass Panel Painting (BGPP) – combining fusing glass with painting and metal (copper plates). Nowadays I combine these methods with the most modern technologies: acryl, Digital print, video, and computer graphics. These techniques derive from each other, influence and inspire each other creating harmony.

The most dramatic event of my life has probably been when due to an erroneous diagnosis I worked in the belief that I would only live one more month. Looking back this was my most successful artistic period. I reevaluated everything in the world and completely new pictures and a new attitude to the world got visualized in my mind. Due to the difficulties I had to endure during my illness I did realize I had no time for l'art pour l'art and reflect the beauty of the world merely as aesthetic experience but my art must have a purpose, a message and impact on people. And this is an enormous responsibility. My pictures are intellectual messages to be decoded and they give very intense emotional experience at the same time with their almost shocking wealth of details, intricacy and colors. I would like to live to see the same colorful world that I got to know in my youth and be able to show it to everybody.

“Below you the Earth, above you the sky and the ladder is in you.” (Sándor Weöres)