There was music in my life even in my Mama's tummy. She was born into a family of a hard working people in a vineyard, on the shores of the Danube River in former Yugoslavia. Against all odds, she was drawn to classical music and opera from early childhood and after WW2 she pursued classical training, continued perfecting her soprano voice and singing all her life, becoming a top notch performer and teacher.
My love for music and art comes from her, as well as a profound sensitivity and passion for it. I feel very deeply like Mama, specially when it is music. I definitely have a form of synesthesia because I don't just hear music. I can't quite describe what I feel throughout my body, all over my skin, in my heart and soul. It moves and motivates me very much and I often paint a certain way - use certain colours and textures- depending on what I am listening to, which can be a very eclectic mix of genres creating distinct ambiance for my oeuvre.
When I first saw a Jackson Pollock painting up close in New York in the late 90s, it blew me away. Never had I experienced a piece so intense, so full of passion and force. No photograph can really do it justice, and that is all I knew before. When I returned from the trip, I decided I had to do something in homage to this great artist who was so revolutionary and significant. I had never experimented with industrial and house paint, but I tried, first on canvas, then on MDF. I did not know, until I watched the Ed Harris movie about Pollock's life, that he often painted to jazz music, which was so fundamental for his time and generation. More than trying to copy him – which is virtually impossible because of the way he painted and his completely spontaneous technique – I tried to simply reproduce the essence of his free expression.
The first time I created a piece in abstract expressionism was to a Wagner CD. I started to build up a solid colour base with house paint and then used distinct brushes and wooden sticks to create those droplets, streams and puddles, always with a sense of basic composition and rhythm. Pollock was an intense and sadly, troubled man. My life thankfully lacks that drama, but I do connect to the intense passion sometimes involved in painting. My colour schemes are different and I incorporated automotive paint over time to give the work an even more textured and glossy look. My album here is called Pollarize- a bit a play on words. Pollock and polarize (from the world of physics where light or other waves are forced to vibrate in particular patterns, as well as used in a more social context). That is what abstract, modern art does to most people. Either they love it or they don't. To own a piece of abstract expressionism will always make you discover something new every day in the shapes, contours, colours. That is also what my clients have shared about their personal experience after hanging my abstract work on their walls. It is to a degree a representation of our modern world, this organized chaos we live in.
Dreaming of Pollock is automotive and house paint on canvas. Private collection, Calgary, Canada