In my landscape painting, I am forever trying to
capture the right light, the fleeting reflection of light on nature, when
working on canvas. I feel excited and responsible for the success, or failure
of my efforts to represent that light. I watch that game of changing lights in
nature with their mutual effects and, as far as I can, I conjure them up on
canvas to illustrate that happiness of living in such beautiful surroundings.
Regardless of the time or effort involved I am anxious to succeed. I try to
transfer to my paintings what I have seen with my eyes and the vision in my
mind, in order to show future generations where, how and in what kind of
idyllic life we used to live.
Sekula Dugandzic
There is, in his paintings, a certain nostalgia for
a world which is constantly disappearing. The nostalgia of a chronicler, for
the places and people of his childhood.”
Franjo Llikar, art critic
Sekula Dugandziv was born in 1935 in Azapovici near Sarajevo in Bosnia and
Herzegovina. He is an artist painting in the “naive” style.
Sekula first began painting as a hobby without
any formal training. He has been painting now for over four decades and is well
known in the former
Yugoslavia
and abroad. His reputation does not come solely from being a member of the
recognised naive school of painting and the demand that exists for this art in
the former
Yugoslavia
. Sekula is famous for his special style of painting,
based on his great sensitivity and enthusiasm for the world around him; a world
in which he has such a great interest. In style, in his close observation, and
in his lifestyle, Sekula reminds us of the artists of the past. These painters
from the past had not known suspicion. They had no care for public recognition.
As a self-confident artist, Sekula Dugandzic has a similar attitude and
enthusiasm.
Note: This article has been extracted from one
of the catalogues and is intended to give you more information about the artist
and his paintings.
This style of naive art has several prominent
representatives in the world. Let us remember, for example, Renee Rember, whose
painting does not in the least resemble that which we used to consider naive.
The general interest, that at one time was aroused by the Hlebine School, is
certainly one of the reasons why we started to regard naive art as identical
with the painting of distorted proportions and deformed shapes. We do not find
this in the painting of such an individual and original artist as Sekula
Dugandzic.
In Sekula’s work there is often a wide panorama
of scenery with characteristically white painted cottages, with small windows
and steep roofs. Sometimes Sekula’s sight stops at a small village, where the
distant red roofs of houses disturb the green balance of the picture, making it
more compelling. While observing the village houses from a closer perspective,
he notices every detail of its life: with chickens in a garden, haystacks, and
horses grazing. When painting a man sitting at a table in front of his cottage
with the garden in full bloom, Sekula catches the beauty of man’s life in
everyday contact with nature. Quiet flocks in meadows, sometimes with shepherds
looking after them, show how animals, people and even the architecture of the
houses, coalesce with the landscape in which they are living and existing.
Undisturbed harmony is particularly expressed
by Sekula’s winter landscapes, where houses are swamped under the snow with
deep gullies running to and from them. Arrangement in Sekula’s paintings is
very important. Depending on whether he captures a landscape that includes the
sky or if he lowers the point of horizon so that the sky cannot be seen, the
atmosphere of the picture changes dramatically. In his “landscapes without
sky”, Sekula attains a personal sense of the metaphysical, even when they have
the very recognisable motif of flocks of sheep, shepherds, and villages. In
such arrangements he demonstrates
Bosnia
’s parochialism, of which Ivo Andric had written, and
exerts a deceptive power that reveals so much more than what is hidden in the
work of previous artists. In such “parochial landscapes” the artist at times
goes to lyrical extremes in skilfully concealing the curved shapes of the
female form.
Other examples of Sekula’s work are his
paintings of various scenes from village life, which are always expressed with
factual precision and definition. There are scenes of railway
station, women in a field carrying pottery for cheese and milk, grain
threshing, the village fair and so on. In these paintings, his art can be
expressed in the decorativeness of traditional clothes. In all of these
paintings, the beauty of simultaneous work, the involvement of large numbers of
people peacefully gathered in the same work, is sensitively felt. There is a
dominant feeling of strong inter–connectivity between the participants of the
scene.
Sekula’s third favourite theme is probably the
scenes of old Bosnian towns buzzing with life, particularly the old square
where people gather, chat, and pass through. The characteristic architecture of
the old Bosnian houses covered with wooden roofs, show sense right in their
asymmetricity. Steep roofs appeal to the heavy winters which caused their
shape. Many such towns have disappeared, but Sekula’s paintings express
happiness from having seen and memorised them. Perhaps, such paintings could
not be painted in any other way.
Nevertheless, the best of Sekula’s art is felt
in his verdant landscapes, with the undisturbed presence of villagers. There
are also hard traces of man’s life, but this life is so permeated with grass,
greenness, or snow, that the artist is happy in his paintings simply because he
lives with nature. In Sekula’s paintings there is no trace of the strenuous and
hard life of country villagers, as it is present in the work of many other
naive artists in the former
Yugoslavia
. His paintings are odes of happiness to
Bosnia
’s “hills without sky”, a song of gratitude because he has
found something in nature he carries in his soul something which he thought he
had dreamt many times. This link between Sekula’s personally desired
imagination and his wish to confirm in the world which surrounds him, brings to
his paintings an intimacy with the observer who believes them, and therefore
manages to directly feel their beauty
When civil war broke out in the former
Yugoslavia
leading to tragic results, particularly in
Bosnia and
Herzegovina
, with mass murder, destruction and terrible suffering for
so many innocent people, Sekula’s style of painting changed dramatically. As
an everyday witness of the war, he suddenly stops his positive treatment of
light, in which he has been so influential, and withdraws from his usual
realistic style. In his new artistic vision, he enters a world of fantasy where
darkness replaces light, and black, deep black, is the dominant colour. The
artist has created an evil being which grows like a dangerous bacteria and
which lays waste the formerly idyllic homeland. Houses, animals, and people
disappear. Death is everywhere. Such was the artist’s vision of
Bosnia
during the war.
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