From the Earth to Humanity
Anna C. Broome
Serbian artist painter Milica Jelisavcic delivers a restlessness, a meeting of ground to human life, experience and need. Her expression of a universal life-source through stroke, color, and subject surmises a delicate yet gnarled and twisted bounty of riches through her use of pumpkin, high heels as metaphor.
Milica was born in Bajina Basta, Serbia in 1984. Showing an early talent for painting, Milica’s first art show was at age seven. After attending the secondary “School of Design”, Milica was accepted to the Braca Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade, Serbia.
“My passion for art is deeply rooted in my childhood like an abstraction or surreal reality.”
Precocious and determined Milica finished top of her class. It is however the early connection to subject through the beauty and creativity inspired by her grandmother, who through use of all the walls in her home, provided Milica with her first canvasses.
“I always had pencil and color pens in my hands. As far my medium is concerned, I personally prefer oil paints: I find it has a transparent quality, and due to its much longer drying time, allows me the best ability to blend colors into the infinite variations found in the natural world. I also utilize acrylic and chalk.
“My passion for art is deeply rooted in my childhood like an abstraction or surreal reality.”
Mikia was attracted to the beauty and rare particulars of pumpkin(s) the day her grandmother brought them home and laid them on the table.
Milikea recalls, ” I remember seeing them as they righted themselves awkwardly on the table, pumpkins as a unique fixture deeply moved me and as the days went by the pumpkins changed as all things in nature do. The pumpkins changed in color and texture. It became ripe with promise and possibility. I saw this in all of creation, always changing and maturing so I began to paint them.”
In looking from a wide perspective the pumpkins represented in Milicas’s work form a giant landscape. Upon inching slower to the pieces, each groove, brush stroke form a collage of ecosystems filled with individual colonies. Although there are no signs of human as an individual life source, instead a land exploration includes a universal sexuality complete with male and female sexual organs.
Yet this does not distract, the maze-like experience allows the eye to travel without a visible sexual focus; however, the philosophy of thought begins to come through: it is the removal of sexuality from the unreliable human source and extending it to the bizarre placement of pumpkin that allows a different perspective, a unique telling of the human sexual reality.
Milica’s inspiration also stems from exposure to artists such as Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin. The still life work of Van Gogh includes: Still Life with Two Jars and Two Pumpkins”, which like Milica’s work depicts the ‘Galeux d’Eysines’ as opposed to the smooth variety of pumpkin, which perhaps as a form of human reality. In the Van Gogh painting the Jars offer contract, but in Milica’s pieces the contrast in created in the mind of the viewer.
The art is not limited to the spectacle of pumpkin as it encompasses a variation of image while maintaining subject and source of expression.
The high heel series offers a more direct relationship between image and subject matter. Instead of the treatment of flesh as image, Milica exposes the still current view of female sexuality with the view of high heel as a as a means to joyfully mock the flagrant violation of social stigma as the shoes in these painting remain legless.
“My erotica series explores yet contains sensuality through eroticism. High heels represent a stigma of female eroticism perhaps under the nail of chauvinism but to me and what is represented in my work is a freedom, a determination for [women] to experience an eroticism according to their own will and sources of pleasure.”
The Butterfly Series represents itself not as a maze of exploration or the blatant stigma of sexulaity but instead as a natural, beautiful example of the purpose and tenderness of sexual experience. Milica does not suggest butterfly as all sexual encounter but a view of intimacy.
“Not in contrast to my other work subjects, my nature series also states an eroticsm, a natural satisfation through beauty, art, sensuality as a means of existence visible in all living things. “The Butterflies” extend the essence of this philosophy as they spread their wings free and eternally captured.”
“Even in a creations eventual decay there is an unexpected beauty, and I work to capture this in all my work.”
Milica is currently working on a new series of large portraits entitled Je t’aime.
Milica has shown in over thirty gallery shows worldwide, including but not limited to:
Progres Gallery (Belgrade)
Graphic Collective Gallery (Belgrade)
Alter Seestieg (Gudlow)
Gallery Decorate (Hamburg)
BK Gallery (Blegrade)
Culture Centre Gallery (Bajina Basta)
Art Gallery (Los Angeles)
Pollenate L.A. “A Canvas for Reality and Capital
Novel Cafe (Los Angeles)
Blooms (Los Angeles)
Santa Fe Art Walk (Los Angeles)
Em&Co (Los Angeles)
Pomona Art Museum ( Los Angeles)
District Gallery (Los Angeles)
Art Share LA Gallery
H Studio (Los Angeles)
Current Show: The Corner Gallery (Los Vegas)
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Honey on the road to San Francisco with some of the Spanish explorers
NOTES FROM ABOVE GROUND
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste)
"Cities of the Golden Gate," Raymond Dabb Yelland, 1893. Most illustrations can be enlarged by clicking on them.
Prologue to the story of the Spanish exploration and settlement of California
Seasonal migrations of animals now extinct in California probably created the roads the native people used before the Spanish land exploration of California. “The heyday of giant mammals in North America was the middle and late Pleistocene, an epoch that started 2.6 million years ago and ended 11,700 years ago, around the time the Earth was thawing out from the Ice Age. The gigantic beasts, which migrated from Asia across a now-vanished land bridge called Beringia, are known as Rancholabrean megafauna, after the famous La Brea tar pits in downtown Los Angeles — the graveyard of thousands of saber-toothed tigers, giant bison and other extinct animals.”[1]
The seasonal migrations of the large mammals may have created the substantial roads used by the indigenous people after their arrival.[2]
Paul S. Martin and Richard G. Klein argue that Paleoindian over-hunting led to the extinction of the megafauna.[3] Others argue that climate change was responsible for mammoth and mastodon extinctions. As the last major glaciation ended around 12,000 years ago, climate warmed too quickly for the megafauna to adapt.
