Pollarize. Music and passion for abstract art.

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

Cosmos and where it begun...for me.

I still feel my hand in his hand, I was very young, maybe 10 or 11 years old. It must have been July or August. That moonless, cloudless summer night, a fresh sea breeze was blowing in my face, the aroma of island lavender pungent in the air as we walked down the short dirt path through the small pine forest that led to the small pier where a couple of fishing boats docked.

Losinj, in the northern Adriatic Ocean, was still without electricity and we were staying at the house of friends of my parents. We walked along the pier until the end and sat down – our feet dangling but not touching the water.

Then Dad told me to look up to the sky. Just the memory of it gives me shivers. It was so, so black – almost shiny and within that intense blackness there were so many stars. My father explained to me the firmament, the constellations – Vega, Orion, The Big Dipper, The Little Dipper, Sirius, Pleiades., Polaris, Arcturus....and ruling that array of stars....the majestic arch of the Milky Way. I don't know how long we sat there. I fell in love with the cosmos. A love affair that continues to this day. I wish my math proficiency had been significant because I would have definitely embraced astrophysics for my professional life. It was not meant to be. I am still an aspiring amateur scholar of all things 'space', subscribed to Scientific American. My biggest personal achievement related to astrophysics is that I actually met Carl Sagan as his personal interpreter during an international summit in Mexico.

My creative work is riddled and intimately intertwined with the universe – both through colours and words, there is no end to this personal fascination. In my canvases I seek to give visual life to that feeling -of what can't be described -when we see the wonders of the cosmos. It is vast but intimate; infinite and yet so familiar. Through my own craft, experiment and technique I create textures and forms that are an interpretation of diverse objects in space. The countless sand particles in my canvas produce a visual approach to the transparency in space and the refraction of light in gas and dust clouds.

Even so many years later I still think about that experience with my Dad. He has been gone for a long time, but I will be forever grateful to him for showing me so many fundamental things in nature, history, human intellect, art and thus motivating me to project those feelings and visions into canvas and stories.  Wish you were here Tata!