First Post

Well, there we go!

Welcome to all of you who are so kind to spare some of your precious time and visit this tiny particle of the vast Virtual Universe, and  to share with me some thoughts on Art, my approach to it and everything else that is connected to it. This is the first post of my first Blog and I will try to come with new posts as often as possible. I am a busy person who spends much of his life with a painting brush in his hand, and has trouble finding time for other things. So, please be patient with me and my blog, because after all “Patience is a virtue”.

First of all, I want to thank Dragan Bibin and Vanja Todoric for convincing me to start with this blog and for their generous offer to help me create and maintain it.

Giants - The Bull Fight

This painting was created for a book on Serbian mythology called “Banished Demons” ("Prognana bića"). It deals with a group of giants who  are amusing themselves by watching a bull fight. The painting is inspired by one of the most celebrated paintings from the history of Serbian art named “The Cock Fight”, and as such it is an homage to its creator Paja Jovanovic, who is one of the greatest Serbian masters from the 19^th and 20^th century. 

This is a preliminary drawing done with graphite pencils. I started sketching on a relatively small piece of paper without a conscious intention of making the drawing of the whole composition.  But the sketch progressed well and soon, crossing the invisible line between Sketch and Drawing, it grew into a proper preliminary drawing. Hence the vertical line across the drawing which is a consequence of me adding a new sheet of paper to accommodate the needs of the growing composition. What else could you expect from drawing the giants, who somehow always tend to be bigger in size than my drawing paper. This preliminary drawing consists of three separate sheets of paper.

This is the underpainting done on Masonite board. I usually mix several of different colors on my palette  in order to get a kind of reddish ochre,  which I use to do the underpainting. I paint in oils.

After the underpainting was sufficiently dry I proceeded by painting the background, mixing the paint with enough painting medium. The applied paint is transparent and permits the reddish underpainting to come through and enrich and infuse the painted shadows with a certain glow. I often try to keep the shadows transparent because mighty  Rembrandt “told” me to do so (more about that in a future post).

More giants are starting to appear making their way through the brush strokes.

People say “Less is more” and it is often true, but of course not always. Anyway, it works well  for me and my painting technique and therefore I try to paint, or better say to suggest the form  through  the expressive brush strokes  (more about that  in a future post, as well).

This is the finished painting. The size of it is  90 x 55 cm, or 35 1/2 x 21 1/2 inch. 

A detail from the finished painting showing  the faces of a few giants. As you can see, beside enjoying an exciting bull fight,  the giants also love to smoke pipe and to drink a proper size glass (at least a few of them) of strong ale or brandy, especially the famous plum-brandy named Sljivovitsa. No wonder they often could be seen dancing as crazy through the countryside, as the image from below clearly shows.