Natasa
Cetinic was born on 9 May 1940 in Blato on the Island
of Korcula. She graduated from the Academy of Fine
Arts in 1964 in the class of Professor Miljenko Stancic.
She taught art in Blato from 1964 to 1966. She was
associate in the Krsto Hegedusic Master Workshop from
1966 to 1970. To date she has shown at 30 one-person
and 300 group exhibitions. She lived and worked in
Zagreb and in Prigradica - Blato, Korcula. Natasa
Cetinic died on 4th June 2001 in Zagreb.
Is
it still necessaey to remind of the peculiar work
of a painter whose presence in the past three decades
owes little or nothing to widely publicized programmes
or repeated ads? It may be appropriate to say that
she has been defending the position of a silent
craft painter along the traditional expressionist
lines suited to her poetic experience gained in
her native localiti. Indeed, she has been following
a certain typology of our local land scape painting.
In her case it is the entirely specific insular
motif (she was born in Blato on the island of Korcula)
as a visual and psychological foothold and a morphological
source on which she has been building her figurative
concept of a painting about the landscape.
From
the very outset of her career as an artist Natasa
Cetinic has been convinced in the genuine nature
of her visions fed on immediate perception, the
time and space laden with existential layers, fragments
of memories and shocks of nostalgia. True to the
visual side of experience, she had been consistent
in implementing the concept of allegiance to an
ideal, the picture - and - light synthesis, cherishing
the art of human equilibrium. Against such spiritual
background she has stayed firmly in the orbit of
her roots, exposed, at the same, time, to the temptations
of creative imagination, discovering all the variety
of those invisible structures of physical reality
hidden in the landscape architecture and the natural
phenomena of light - and - colour mutations. She
has been a keen observer of the imprints and scars
of time filtered through living emotions into condensed
expressive metaphors.
In
her case, the reliance on the authentic experience,
leaning on her familiar insular landscape or the
pictography of the native soil, means in no way
that she is stuck in the worn - out patterns of
traditional figuration. What is fully expressed
in her tendency to figuration is the tremendous
complexity of what is going on in the mind in the
process of sensual transformation of the outside
world. In her case it is a succession of obsessive
native images: cypress - trees and graveyards coves,
processions, churches and pine - groves, viewed
through an inner vista of some remote experience
being processed into an increasingly material and
colourist picture.
By
tuning her optics and chromatic registers to the
intensity of her expressionist feelings, she has
also been modifying some primary features of her
painting, now fully expressed in her new log - book
cycle presented in the combined gouache technique.
On the diluted water - colour surface interspersed
with chalk sketches you will see graphic and graphite
blackness, elsewhere saturated pigments of thick
paint smudges. Such intensified dynamics occurring
on the surface through a contrasting interchange
and reshuffling of brush strokes and graphic patterns
reveals the inner drama of melanholic anxiety striving
for a spiritual equilibrium. This is achieved by
a peculiar combination of crude drawing and pastel
spots. The precious virtue of her work is that the
lyrical does not exclude the epic, that the impulsive
gesture, delicate touch and the sheer joy of painting
can all go hand in hand. Thus a fragment of a chapel
or a crucifix inserted in a motif, by their very
symbolism, will arouse respect for patient building
work and, at the same time, refined feelings cogently
summed up in scarse stretches of diluted pigments.
The vertical cypress - trees and the outlines of
figures walking in procession will underline the
gesture or strengthen a colourist accent, reinforcing
the composition to the extreme. By stepping into
the deph of space her art has came nearer to graphics
and colourism shot through with drawing texture
and cooled emotions extracted from the context of
reality. By using the inserts of would - be arabesques,
initiated in some earlier works, she has provided
her landscape with the aura of an intimate book
of memories.
All
this inventory of images and manuscripts is headed
for the same goal: a summary of impressions and
visual imprints, a true picture of her native soil,
able to absorb the fragments of her living experience,
the conglomerates of dissipated reality.It is a
pursuit for identify and existantial foothold, for
a physical and spiritual space suited to freed emotions.
It is also an attempt to present the universal picture
of a locality in which light and colour determine
the intrinsic nature of her painting.
