Portrets
It has been my love for many years. It is a kind of communication with a person on the other side.
Some were commissioned, and others I just made for myself to tell the story. They were free experiments to see how techniques, materials, and colours revealed what I wanted to tell.
To paint a portrait is to look for a connection between the subject’s inner vibration and visual image. The art of transferring that same vibration into the poetry of the painting. Into colors, lines ond objects. You can never make a picture identical to the subject; they can be similar, but never exactly the same, because in the world of matter … perfect copies do not exist. So I do not even try. I am just painting a reflection in the void of vibration.
Arhangel Michael, 2019
Arhaingel Michael is a family protector by my father side. It is a tradition in orthodox Hercegovina and all Balcan regions to have a family patron. In this way, they knew who was related.
St. John the Baptist was painted by Leonardo da Vinci from 1513 to 1516; it is believed to be his last painting. It is an oil painting on walnut wood. The original size of the work was 69×57 cm. It is now exhibited at the Musée du Louvre in Paris, France. I love this painting so much I have decided to pay homage to Leonardo da Vinci for the exhibition on caste Snežnik by taking his painting as an inspiration for a portrait of Archangel Michael. The story began long ago. The first sketch was made in 2016. The first painting was created with tempera on wood in 2017. But I wanted to paint him with the sfumato technique, just like Leonardo da Vinci did on walnut wood in the original size of the work, 69×57 cm. I have made 128 thin layers of colour and silver dust to get the final image.
Painting with light is based on Leonardo da Vinci’s sfumato technique. Painting with light is diametral to the usual painting, image is not made by putting material on the surface but by alluring the light out of material. It is a painting based on the ancient knowledge about the nature of light and the latest research in quantum physics. Painting with light combines the physical, emotional and rational aspect of painting.
The Beauty of the Human Race, 2021
The media and mainstream science convince us we are in the age of reason. Is that true? Looking around me, I see increasingly unhappy, lonely and exhausted people convinced they only have two options: to find a way to earn money and achieve happiness as quickly as possible or to change their lives, become more connected to nature and save humanity and the Earth. What is apparent to an outside observer or educated person is that there is nothing new in this, and the same duality has been happening throughout the history of humanity. Hegel already said that all we can learn from history is that we learn nothing from it. And to cut it short. Money is not the solution to all personal problems, and man is not so omnipotent as to save the Earth.
The composition of paintings “The Beauty of the Human Race” was created after the “lockdown” and is my response to all the stupidity and ideas that are and still are “rampant” through social media. Let me list just a few; if we continue like this, the world will end; the solution is in reason and AI, obsession with “junk” spirituality; when humanity becomes extinct, and we will be gone, everything will be fine again.
“The Beauty of the Human Race” is my rebellion against rationalization and stupidity.
The beauty of life is in ecstasy, in those moments when we feel full or almost complete. The fact is that we are most alive in the ecstasy of life. It does not matter how someone got there or what path they took to reach the point where life flows through them. That is a matter of personal path and choice, and there is no right or wrong. Beauty is in a person’s interior and experiencing life in all its fullness. It is the only perfection that a person can experience. As Sebastjan Vörös says in the book Images of the Indescribable, the desire for the mystical, the spiritual in a person is as strong, if not stronger, than the desire for other “foods”. Spirituality is a part of man and not an “elective subject”.
“The Beauty of the Human Race” celebrates ecstasy and is painted in the manner of Dionysian art, as defined by Friedrich Nietzsche. This ecstatic art, poetics, is almost eliminated from our lives today. Just look at the situation in elementary schools; are children allowed to be ecstatic? No. They are immediately hyperactive and have a disorder of focusing and concentration, … Ecstasy is equated with sin or madness or frivolity. The truth could not be more opposite. Ecstasy is the opposite of greed or sin. Because when the desire for material wealth and experiences disappears, ecstasy sets in. Only the beauty of life remains. That is what we long for.
The composition of the paintings is precise construction and consideration of the laws of the visual language, from the size of the format, composition, number of paintings, and geometry within them and in the patterns. They are painted using the sfumato technique with a large number of thin glaze layers.
Commission
George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, 2022
The composition follows the wooden base. The third eye is in the centre of a portrait. That point combines the golden ratio (horizontal line) and equilibrium (vertical line). Three layers of base colour mixed with fine dust made from brick from ZÌŒicÌŒka Kartuzija, a 1000-year-old monastery in Slovenia. An enneagram from silver, gold, and copper is at the back of the painting. I use the natural hole in the wood to shock (Gurdjieff method for waking people) the viewer because it is in an almost impossible place. I also made the painting in a way he did it for the development of human beings.
BODY: Materials I choose, the moving of my body when I paint, imaginary body in painting
SENSES: colours, light, the way I apply layers of colours, like in sacred dances.
MIND: composition – geometry, combination of colours, understanding of painting