( essey from Monography)
My painting days conveniently coincide with an age when art has already been alienated from it audience. An age taken over by establishment, which has to convince the insecure people whether they like something or not.
But do You really need someone else to tell You if You are hungry, thirsty, satisfied, whether You will buy or not buy theese shoes or that thing.
So Liking and attraction are universal and related directly to the deepest and simplest truths of the life within us. Because we can all tell if we need something or not, as well as whether or not, and to what extent the decision we have made is right.ž
The apartment where I was born, that first balcony on the white building, right next to Rajićeva Mall, was riddled with cockroaches. And everyone said – that was because of old building. Than I moved to Slavia, also to an old building. For my entire time, there I saw two cockroaches, Mitza and Danitza. Mitza I killed, but Danitza escaped from me and I never saw her again.
In the appartment where I live now, there are none, although, as before it is an old building. Now I Have built this atmosphere into which they cannot penetrate. Cockroaches are attracted to darkness and bad atmosphere. They come from the darkness and flee from light in sheer panic.
It`s the same with liking and attraction. Everything about us that represents life, attracts light and it`s the same the other way around. I do not paint morbid scenes or severed heads and I think nothing on installations. I am proud that, in and of themselves, my paintings are attracted to people and that no establishment has to translate to anyone just what I meant to say. And people mostly come to me on their own, strongly assured that they have been attracted to a thing they like. My paintings have, on their own, attracted audiences on all continents. Because good painting is a painting You like, and a bad painting is one that you don`t like. Everything else is irrelevant, and as a painter my professional role in this is – the way I bring You to like it.
Nowdays, that whole atmosphere of alienation, coordinated by various establishments, has imposed on the artist, and the painter especially, a certain stereotype that they are first associated with; One that I reject and do not wish to be a part of. Because the artist of today is in most cases, something incomprehensible to the majority of people, it`s like a labyrinth in some godforsaken place, something that only goes against the grain, something for whitch, perhaps, the mildest expression would be, weirdo, lest I use a different, more precise epithet. Something that suffers, whines, badgers, spreads the sorrow of hopelessness without wistfulness as well as the most terrible discontent and it radiates – non life. And it is light years away from any life affirming logic, which in itself makes it both completely anintelligible and incoprehensible, not to say nonsensical.
But the life in me, You, in everything around us is too beautiful and to simple to allow for any presence of darkness.
I want to live my life to the fullest, to be joyful, to feel, to learn and discover, to travel, to own, to have a beautiful wife and beautiful things, in this very moment and in this life. In simpler words, everything that any other normal living being honestly desires.
And if in the course of my painting days I manage even if it`s just a little bit, to push aside that stereotype and the relations that alienate life and informations from life itself, I will take it as if I head done something truly great.
Miša Mihajlo Kravcev
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