I present to you my elegant artistic space, which combines my working art studio with a corner for clients and finished oil works, available for purchase.

Here, over a cup of aromatic coffee, you can purchase original oil paintings, as well as gift vouchers of various designs.

You will also have the opportunity to take a peek at “where the magic is made” and view started canvases in progress – they can be requested in advance, even before they are completely ready and before they are published on the website and on social media.

Continue reading Acrista Art Studio + Clients Area at Acrista Cafe.

I present to you a project, the implementation of which brought me great pleasure in all its aspects – from communicating with the client, through the creation process, to the arrangement of the picture in the interior. “Paint Me Love” is a commissioned oil painting that I created for a specific location and is my largest commission of a female figure to date. The whole project lasted one year.

When we started discussing the commission, the client and her husband had already purchased several of my other paintings. She was already familiar with the process of commissioning a painting (the article The Artistic Challenge can be read here and the rest of the details of how to commission an Acrista Art painting are in the FAQ on acrista.com) and we went straight to discussing which series / painting of mine we would be the inspiration for hers.

Continue reading Creating “Paint me Love” – commission artwork at Acrista Cafe.

Over the past few years, I have observed with sadness and weariness that the efforts I make on a daily basis to maintain the Facebook page fall far short of the desired results, needed for me to function as a freelance artist.

As a person, who does almost everything by myself, this means I spend a huge amount of time, energy and mental resources figuring out “what to post each day” to keep the page “alive”. I invest in expensive art products, photo sessions, video scripts, video shooting, video editing, planning posts, writing texts for them… And all this only reaches my top 10 fans (thank you from the bottom of my heart for your support ), out of all the 20K that have liked and/or followed my page, because that’s how the algorithm “works”.

Continue reading Out of the Matrix at Acrista Cafe.

Acrista Art Calendar 2024 is now in pre-sale! It turned out to be a real little art jewel, as it was intended.

As I have mentioned more than once, producing a quality elegant product is not an easy task. That’s why we create calendars with my paintings every few years :).

This time we started already in July with work on the concept, the selection of paintings, the choice of the font for the calendar and on the design, we continued in August with the selection of paper and creating a sample, for a visualisation of how the calendar will look, in September we received offers from printing houses and discussed what kind of packaging we can use… and here we are, it’s almost the end of October and we’re getting ready to go to press, and then it’ll be time to send out and bring joy.

Continue reading Acrista Art Calendar 2024 is now available at Acrista Cafe.

Every time we have an occasion to give joy, we are looking for an idea for an original gift that is special, non-standard, memorable. For me, a painting can be all these things, and at the same time bring a unique emotion and a personal message. It can become a colorful accent in the interior, be it in the home or the office.

Give yourself a gift

It very often happens that clients come to my studio wanting to purchase a painting as a gift… to themselves. These moments are indescribably satisfying for me as an artist.

Continue reading Choosing an artwork as a gift? Always a wonderful idea. at Acrista Cafe.

The artworks I create for a specific occasion (anniversary, new home, birthday, wedding etc.) or for a specific premise (home or office), as requested by a client, I call commissions.

Let me make two very important clarifications – in my practice painting commissions are not portraits of real people made from reference photo (I explicitly don’t do such things), and they are also not copies of other paintings, mine or anyone else’s (if you want a copy of a particular painting of mine – you can always order a Limited Edition Print).

Over the years I have various cases of commissioned artworks – sometimes the interior design gravitated around a larger painting, that is the focus point and acts as a central piece in the interior.

Continue reading Commissioned artwork – the artistic challenge at Acrista Cafe.

I rarely write about mishaps because my focus is on beautiful and creative things, but this time I am going to share an experience for my colleagues (and not only).

The story in brief: I had an order from an international customer for an original painting 80 x 80 cm. To transport the painting to Spain I trusted (as I have done in the past) to Speedy. They lost the shipment somewhere along the way.

The story in details:

• the painting was commissioned by my customers in Barcelona and I started working on it in September 2018
• I finished it at the end of 2018, but I wanted to avoid the Christmas hustle so I decided to send it after the New Year
• on January 11ththe local Speedy courier came to pick it up: with a travel abroad certificate and two invoices to the customer
• a brief side note: for Bulgaria I have been using Econt for years (and I am very happy with their service) and I fill in my bills of landing by myself.

Continue reading About a lost painting at Acrista Cafe.

Last year, for the first edition of Women.Speak.Live., Aneta Savova invited me to be one of the presenters and I spontaneously said ‘yes’. But then some personal stories unfolded, had travels abroad for medical examinations, so I had to cancel my participation. This year Ani invited me for a second time and I couldn’t say ‘no’ to her. To be honest, both times my stomach clenched – reactions like ‘what will I say to these kind people there’ and similar inner barriers. But apparently I had reached a stage where I absolutely realized I needed to go out of my comfort zone thus I stamped my foot and I told myself that this was the purpose of such forums: to share how you go beyond yourself, how you grow, how you act despite the fear…

The event passed by.

Continue reading Women.Speak.Live 2018 conference at Acrista Cafe.

as it recently became clear, new times are coming for the most used social network and it is likely that the small business with small advertising budgets will become completely invisible. thus and because I am often told: “I liked many of your paintings, but almost everything was sold”, I decided to invest some effort and write this post, which can be useful to the people who are not very familiar with the advantages of this technology.

there is a very effective way to receive the new information from my website and my blog immediately and not depend on the facebook content.

Continue reading what is RSS and why you should use it at Acrista Cafe.

Recently, I often wonder why when people quote an excerpt from a book or poem, they almost always indicate the author, but with paintings (respectively photographs) they have no attitude that it is necessary to do so. Probably because they are “on the Internet”?

And this is not at all about the wild and wanton use of the images – over the years friends have informed me that my painting has been used without permission for example as a pattern for a tapestry, or copied one-to-one and for sale, or used in a rendering of interior or in the logo of some apocryphal site.

Continue reading Please, give credit to the artists at Acrista Cafe.

Every exhibition has a story, just like every painting in it.

The story of “Delicate and Passionate” began in December 2014 when the British gallery owner Andrew Hillier contacted me with an invitation to work together in his new gallery, where I was going to exhibit next to artists like Vladimir Volegov, Andre Kohn, Atroshenko. During our discussions, the vision of the desired collection of paintings gradually started to take shape – oil canvases with more delicate stories and ones of the more passionate flamenco series.

Alas, the joint project with the gallery did not come to fruition due to Andrew’s deteriorating health, but the idea of the collection of paintings developed into the idea for an exhibition. 

Continue reading The story behind the “Delicate and Passionate” exhibition at Acrista Cafe.

“Hi, Alex. You have been an artist for twenty years, however for some years you worked in office environment at IT companies – a completetely different area. What provoked you to consider making a change? And how did it happen?”

Most of the artists all over the world have a full-time job. It helps them to earn their living while they are developing as artists.

Continue reading About my career path at Acrista Cafe.

Probably one of the most difficult and controversial things in art is setting its price. It’s not an accident that the emerging artists often ask gallery owners, art marketing specialists and established artists how to set the price of their artworks. there are different factors forming this price, but overall they can be reduced to several general ones. As I meet with very different opinions, questions and statements about the artworks’ price, I would like to share some thoughts on the topic:

“This is too expensive”

One of the most common responses of (let’s tentatively call them) art viewers – they usually are not true buyers – is “this is too expensive”.

Continue reading On artwork pricing at Acrista Cafe.

Continue reading “Art is not work; it’s playtime” at Acrista Cafe.

Daniel Sroka: Surviving as an artist in a bad economy >>

Lori Woodward Simons: Freedom vs.

Continue reading To be or not to be… at Acrista Cafe.