About Me

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About fotka2

About myself and my work

My art expression takes place through painting and music. The experience of being a musician constantly puts additional demands in front of me to which I try to respond by painting. The challenges are getting bigger with each successive painting. I have been playing piano for thirty years and have been engaged in music professionally for twenty years. During the last fifteen years, I have intensively devoted myself to painting. First couple of years I spent being privately tutored by the artist Ljubica Radović and afterwards I worked constantly, on my own, on abstract drawings.

I paint because I want to create something visually beautiful, noble, something that will invoke pleasurable images within people, associations, emotions; something they could look at and feel pleased about, something which could connect them with their sub-consciousness and let them be at the same place where I was when painting… or playing, all the same. The art is one, but the fields of expression are numerous and this fact is my eternal inspiration.

While I play, I walk through the inner being of the composer, I explore his conscious and subconscious patterns of creation; while painting I explore my inner being, attentively follow the paths that it leads me to. I make conscious decisions, but all the time I am in a strange connection with the subconscious… Abstraction attracts me mostly because of the subconscious. I have impression that I am closer to it just when I am painting. I feel that I create a visual note of the emotions I experience while I play and so I become a witness that the creativity is one, whilst the forms of its expression are various.

I paint the feeling of fast rhythmical figures,the feeling of warm, long phrases and the feeling of perfect consonance and of intriguing dissonances. I paint the feeling of confusion when all of the notes are there, everything in perfect order, but the life is missing, the meaning of music. I paint the feeling of finding the way through the boredom and of bringing artistic work into life. I paint the way to the final, completed shape that may have a particular meaning for everyone…

Many say that my works are erotic, and I have nothing against that interpretation, but I do not think that it is the only interpretation. In view of the fact that I am concentrated on the processes of creation, it looks like it is inevitable that my sub-consciousness paints some phases of human creation, fertilization of egg cells, playfulness of spermatozoa or perhaps partial scenes of impassioned limbs… Again, my works sometimes remind of the creation of the universe, photographs made in space, although created long before I saw those photographs for the first time…

The initial process is connected exclusively to memorized patterns of thinking through music and emotions related to the processes of working on the music, which are directly presented on the paper through the line, color and shape. More precisely said: subconscious record of conscious musical performance. I say subconscious because at the beginning of the painting I never know where my “musical performance” on the paper will take me to.

The only conscious thing is the movement remembered from playing the music; rhythm, melody and harmony I get from the piano have a new meaning for me when I see them on paper. The choice of colors, the rhythm of lines and atmosphere of every single drawing is every time a surprise. I often start working in a specific mood for which I think that will be transferred to the drawing, but almost always something completely different comes out. To be precise, the prior state was only the initial impulse that led me to much more diversiform experiences than I could expect. And sometimes, the emotions are totally hidden and the only thing that speaks through me is color, the communication among the colors that I choose creates the scenes I couldn’t even imagine.

That’s why I cannot say that my works are pure copying of musical experience. Often, my conscious experiences are confronted with the sensibility of what comes from my subconsciousness.

Playing is the impulse for my painting and painting is the impulse for my playing. At a first glance, it would seem that I paint the things I play, but in fact it is the opposite. Because the subconscious content I get is of immense importance and I use it further in my creation of music, and for work with musicians in general, in the process of realization of opera pieces, in collaboration with singers, conductors, in the public performances…

I create each painting patiently, during a long time, always exploring new artistic expressions.

Nada Matijević