unearthly silence surrounds the paintings of Bobby Popo, causing viewers, at their first glance, to experience a frisson of excitement, as they cross from the neat bed-sitter of their conscious mind, to the vast, mysteriously distorted mansions of the unconscious. Popo's paintings conduct the viewer on a quest to the depths of their being; a quest which, for him, started on the 25th April, 1945, when he was born in the little town of Prilep in Macedonia.

Bobby Popo was the son of a priest and the youngest child of a family of five. In the Popo household, painting and drama were a part of everyday life.

In his spare time, Popo loved wandering in the archaic mountains around Prilep. One of his favourite haunts was the Elephant rock, a vast natural edifice resembling an elephant towering over the town. Many years later, Popo painted this rock in his picture "The Worship of a Mammoth". Its obscure mass may well have represented the infinite realms of his unconscious mind.

From an early age, his father instilled in him with dramatic emphasis, a thirst for the mysteries of life and an understanding of good and evil. At the age of twelve he remembers writing an essay about becoming a painter: to hold a brush in his hand so that he could paint his destiny, paint it so that neither time nor fortune itself could erase it. At the age of fourteen he won a prize as the best young artist in Yougoslavia.

During his three years as a student of drama he was haunted by the desire to paint. Much of his free time was spent in art galleries until one day he found himself face to face with Bosch's "Garden of Earthly Delights". This picture provided a link for him between disparate aspects of his own vision. Bosch showed him the way on canvas to combine into an unearthly loveliness his remote vision of the external world with savage, sensual, often distorted images that thronged the recesses of his inner world.