Maya Kulenovic

MAYA KULENOVIC

Maya Kulenovic is an active, contemporary painter. Her work consists mostly of close up portraits with a sprinkling of landscapes and cityscapes. Her portraits tend to depict pale figures sort of emerging from a dark background, and if you look at her oldest work and compare it to her most current, you will see that over time her figures have become more misty and atmospheric, more obscured.

DUCHESS, 2007, 30"x30"

NEBULA, 2011, 27"x23"

She works in oil paints, using many layered glazes, and she doesn't typically begin work with the final image in mind, rather, she prefers to let the image build itself. This process helps create the wonderful visual textures in her work, especially in her more recent images, adding to the ephemeral vision of her figures.

MIRAGE, 2011, 30" x 30"

"I don't even know what it looks like until I recognize it in a mark on canvas. I wish for my paintings to end up more powerful than I can visualize them. I can achieve this only by allowing something else other than myself into it - an element of randomness - and when something surprising and wonderful happens, I can recognize and distill it, build upon it." –Maya Kulenovic

As an artist, Maya hopes to portray borderline states between being and non being, creation and destruction, life and death, trance and wakefulness, sanity and madness, and more. Her figures are always alone in their dark portraits, posed with nothing else but perhaps their shirt collars or a faint light. All of her works  seem to encourage of feeling of desperation, loneliness, darkness, and uncertainty.

AGRARIAN, 2010, 24" x 18"

She has also painted some desolate landscapes and barren cities. Like her figures, her cities are lonely and pale, devoid of people, projecting a sense of loneliness even more profound than her close up portraits. They typically feature many buildings with even more darkened, empty windows and completely lacking any sort of life, human or otherwise.

BLIND SQUARE, 2006, 24"X52"

Her landscapes are just as empty, but seem even more hauntingly beautiful. They tend to have a more even range of value, whereas her portraits have more darks and her cityscapes have more lights. Pale, broken trees and dry grass are her preferred subject matter, which form these serene landscapes of eerie stillness. When I look at them, I do not feel so much like I am looking at a painting lacking movement, rather I feel like I am looking at a moving, living, breathing place, which has been disturbed and broken - scarred, as marked by the broken trees and parted grass - and that place is now frozen, perhaps by pain or fear, by whatever occurred before our viewing; or like between what has transpired and what is yet to come, it has caught us glimpsing at it, and it intends to hold its breath until we look away.

GATHERING, 2010, 23" x 33"

Amanda Qualls