Ivan Aivazovsky

Paintings of a world long gone inspire a story of love, survival, and the price of courage.

Currently, Ted is writing Perilous Choices, a young adult sci-fi adventure/romance. It is about two teens from alternate worlds who experience tragedy, help each other accept their pasts and learn to love again—but wait, aliens are invading, they’ve captured the teens, and the price of survival may be their very hearts.

The alternate world is inspired and illustrated by the paintings of Ivan Aivazovsky.

Ted’s writing is inspired by Aivazovsky’s paintings because of the artist’s ability to capture the romance of a past world: the culture and people in the lands surrounding the Aegean Sea, Istanbul, and the Caucasus Mountains in the period 1840 to 1870. For me, the paintings evoked a world that cried out for a sweeping story of survival, love, and courage.

About the artist. Ivan Aivazovsky was born in 1817 in the port of Feodosia on the Black Sea. He became one of the greatest Russian romantic painters. Before his death in 1900, he produced over 6,000 paintings. He achieved fame in his lifetime and the playwright, Anton Chekhov, popularized the saying, “worthy of Aivazovsky’s brush”, to describe something beautiful.

Today his paintings sell for millions at auction, hang in major Russian and European museums, and are honored on Russian and Armenian postage stamps here and here.

Contemporary computer graphics artists use Aivazovsky’s paintings as a standard for rendering realistic computer graphics of waves and the sea. If you like video games and/or CGI-enhanced movies, you may have seen something influenced by Aivazovsky’s genius.