Poverty in still life

There’s a reason Dan Petrov depicted a bench instead of a table in his oil painting “Vincent,” a rumination on poverty.

A table, he said, would signify a bountiful meal being served. “A bench,” he added, “is for sitting and waiting, as the problem of social justice is waiting for solution.”

The message wasn’t lost on judges at the 2011 Minnesota State Fair, where “Vincent” won two sponsored awards: the College of Visual Arts Painting Award and the Ron Merchant Award for Oil Painting.

A still life depicting red potatoes, a page from Petrov’s local newspaper, the bench and a wall, “Vincent” is infused with symbolism and includes a partial reproduction of Vincent Van Gogh’s “The Potato Eaters.”

“I am confident that Vincent would not mind,” Petrov wrote in his blog, “since he lived in poverty too.”

The Serbian-born artist, trained in classical realism, rents a studio on the top floor of Nicollet Plaza in Burnsville’s Heart of the City, where he has painted and taught since 2009.

Petrov, 50, of Lakeville, moved from Canada to Minnesota in 2006, 14 years after leaving Serbia.

“I got my education there at university (philosophy and law),” he said in an interview. “And when the political situation got a bit confusing between all the different political factions, I figure out that maybe it’s time to leave. It was 1992. I left kind of before the major mess. Bad people, when they get to power, they make the little guys fighting.”

The art studies he’d begun in Europe after university continued in Canada, where Petrov learned Renaissance techniques from the classically trained Italian painter Sergio De Paoli.

In Minnesota, Petrov was accepted to the Atelier Studio Program of Fine Art in Minneapolis, a four-year program of disciplined daily training that melds formal academics with the influence of the French Impressionists.

“Pretty much it takes whole life to study art,” said Petrov, whose wife, Jelena, is a dentist in St. Louis Park. “Or I might be a slow learner, I guess.”

His work is displayed at the Tamarack Gallery in Stillwater and the Bristol Art Gallery in Bristol, R.I., as well as on his website. Venues for Petrov’s gallery shows have included the performing arts centers in Burnsville and Bloomington.

Petrov said “Vincent,” which has already sold, was inspired by the hands-off treatment that he perceived was given to the issue of poverty during Minnesota’s 2010 gubernatorial campaign.

Nevertheless, he spotted an opinion piece by Don Heinzman in Thisweek Newspapers with a headline declaring that poverty had become an issue in the campaign.

“Vincent” depicts about a dozen red potatoes and two ceramic dishes resting on a Thisweek opinion page bearing the headline. Petrov replaced the text below the headline with a partially hidden reproduction of Van Gogh’s “The Potato Eaters.”

“The newspaper is not an aesthetically attractive object by itself,” Petrov said. “It’s black and white and it’s disposable. Potatoes are also not very inviting and aesthetically pleasing. Same as poverty. Nobody likes to look at that.”

The wall behind the setting is not merely functional.

“The wall in philosophy is a symbol of a problem,” Petrov said. “Many philosophers use that wall in that figurative way.”