Georgi Zlatanov was a painter who, through his love, lyricism, personal touch and native talent, substantiated Bulgarian landscape painting.
All his life he lived in his hometown of Zlatitsa, so his artworks are only known for a narrow circle of friends and connoisseurs. Thus his hometown, domestic atmosphere, family and countryside with its patriarchal nature, vitality and spiritual impact became determinant for the artist’s creativity.
Music and painting filled up all his childhood. And Zlatanov’s lifepath naturally led him to the school for gifted children (musicians and artists) in Sofia. But the war and the bombing of the capital interrupted his studies. The boy returned to Zlatitsa. However his creative aspiration did not die out. His wavering between painting and music continued, but gradually painting got the upper hand. This decision led him to the Academy of Arts in Sofia. The boon student years passed and he went back to Zlatitsa for good.
His independent creative work started with painting portraits of relatives and friends. Both representational and historical portraiture had a place in his work, but the artist was more interested in ordinary people. He painted them with a sense of clear form, precise drawing, with purity and nobility of tone or with more dramatic and mystical coloring, somewhat reminiscent of the classical painting.          Zlatanov did not look for modern shapes and styles. The force that attracted him to painting portraits was the realistic rendering of his models, capturing the state and the emanation of his friends’ and relatives’ images.
„They are like those by Stoilov – a little bit idealized, even to the extend of pictures, and yet lively and precise. He does not let himself be carried away within the composition of the portrait, but the portrait is a kind of concentration: the man is the center“.
The artist could not earn his living by painting and had always to do something additional. For 18 years he was painting movie posters and placards, and twice in his lifetime for periods of 8 years each – at the beginning and at the end of his artist’s path, he worked at the Copper Smelter and Refinery (today „Aurubis Bulgaria“), where he was engaged in depicting the plant, thus sealing it for the future – he was its artist. This was his „job“.
However, it was not the world of his ideal, of his spirit. He himself had long ago made his choice during the student years, when along with Ivan Stoilov – The Bunker they toured the villages around Sofia to search for their favorite landscapes. It was the landscape, regardless of whether it was natural or architectural, that was the discovered genuine area for the artist. The motif in the works of Zlatanov is simple and laconic, and the landscapes themselves are mainly built in width – panoramic. Zlatanov’s landscapes speak of an increasingly consistent inward movement of the artist. The sincerity to the emotional experience and the faithfulness to the poetic truths of nature were the strong points of these landscapes. And when, in the 1970s and 1980s, landscape was no longer a representative genre, the artist did not abandon it. Zlatanov did not consider exhausted the possibilities of the landscape, since for him the depiction of nature was not a thing of fashion. Nature has not lost its appeal. It has secrets to show yet, and he would throughout his life conduct his inner dialogue with what is visible and in how it should be depicted.
Apart from the paintings, the artist made frescoes, reliefs, fountains, etchings, cartoons that are difficult to believe he was the author of. They only prove that Zlatanov’s world was a lot richer, contradictory and diverse than it appeared.
Today the artist’s path has stopped. He departed this world. What has remained are just his works born by his desire to create…