Translated by Filip Korženski
SAD: When and how did you become interested in painting?
PM: It must have been when I was nine, when I started drawing independently with coal from live models on the pavement. Later I also drew on paper, but, in Kavadarci, my home town, there was nobody to teach me, to give me any instructions. When I finished elementary school in Kavadarci I was enrolled in the Secondary Art School in Skopje. My teachers were the painters Nikola Martinoski and Lazar Ličenoski.
SAD: Did both of them have an equal influence on you?
PM: I was one of the best students because I gave myself wholly to painting. I think both of them had a good opinion of me, but Ličenoski had a greater influence on me with his human warmth. He was excited by my results and stimulated me a lot. It was then and there that I realized that art was something which others liked, too.
SAD: There is a line of development in Macedonian painting which begins with Martinoski and, through you, leads to a group of young contemporary painters. What were your contacts with Martinoski, since, in a sense, I consider you his follower. In a morphological sense, you continue his expressionism. Your painting is less a continuation of Ličenoski’s, but more of Martinoski’s. Like Martinoski, you are, too, a painter of passion.
PM: Yes, but I feel matter just like Ličenoski.
SAD: Energy in the matter of Martinoski’s painting depicts the inner personality in a more impressive way.
PM: Ličenoski radiated more as a teacher, he came to me in a warm, humane way, and had time to talk to me. Martinoski was a greater authority but was rather reserved. Yet both respected talent, and, being real artists, supported it.
SAD: Martinoski was something like a cult personality. Young artists gathered around him, as well as other people.
PM: He was like a queen bee. In any case, Ličenoski aroused my interest in matter, and Martinoski in drawing.