Earlier this week, Burgas city library presented "Life After That," the debut book by Burgas artist Petar Kostadinov. Burgas council paid for the book, picking the manuscript from among many submitted by other authors, Kostadinov told Bulgarian National Radio.
The book is autobiographical. It tells the story of a boy who loses everything in an instant and decides to carry on. Kostadinov, now 53, was an active athlete in his youth until an accident left him paralyzed from the waist down.
He says the first year after the accident was the hardest. He went from being an athlete in peak form to someone who couldn't even breathe or scratch himself without help, and he spent a whole year lying flat. "It was very hard for me to go on, but I did it!" he said.
Kostadinov believes no one could get through so many years without "angels" — his word for the people who helped him, whether they meant to or not. He says the word carries real weight for him and he doesn't use it lightly. These are the very people who gave him one of the reasons to write the book.
Kostadinov trained at the Technical School of Shipbuilding, then studied social pedagogy at the faculty of social sciences at Prof. Dr. Asen Zlatarov University in Burgas. He also earned his master's degree in pedagogy there, specializing in social and educational counseling.
He had always enjoyed drawing, and after the accident he suddenly had plenty of time for it, he said. At first he drew just for himself and his friends, then spent 10 years painting intensively. He works in watercolor, gouache, tempera and acrylic.
His art is raw and instinctive, he explained, with every painting shaped by what he himself feels. "They called my style primitivist — complex ideas drawn in a simple way. That was one of my periods," the artist said. He also went through a more colorful phase, full of detail and vivid tones.
His subjects are biblical, such as "Solomon's Judgment," "Cain Kills Abel" and "Adam and Eve," and mythical, such as Romulus and Remus, Sisyphus and Icarus.
For his first exhibition, he got help from the Flemish Federation for the Disabled in Belgium. Later, his paintings appeared in joint exhibitions in Burgas, Plovdiv, Belgium and the Netherlands, through projects run by the federation and by the National Center for Social Rehabilitation. He has also held solo exhibitions at the Burgas Gallery and at the hall of the Union of Bulgarian Artists.
In 2007, Kostadinov illustrated "The Bound Angel," a poetry collection by people with disabilities published by Znaci publishing house.
He is now writing his second book, a novel titled "Samodiva."