Dusan Djukaric
Venice Gondola
Watercolour
33x24cm
Private collection
Santa Maria della Salute (English: Saint Mary of
Health), commonly known simply as the Salute, is a Roman Catholic
church and minor basilica located at Punta della Dogana in the Dorsoduro
sestiere of the city of Venice, Italy.
It stands
on the narrow finger of Punta della Dogana, between the Grand Canal and the
Giudecca Canal, at the Bacino di San Marco, making the church visible when
entering the Piazza San Marco from the water. The Salute is part of the parish
of the Gesuati and is the most recent of the so-called plague churches.
In 1630,
Venice experienced an unusually devastating outbreak of the plague. As a votive
offering for the city's deliverance from the pestilence, the Republic of Venice
vowed to build and dedicate a church to Our Lady of Health (or of Deliverance,
Italian: Salute). The church was designed in the then fashionable baroque style
by Baldassare Longhena. Construction began in 1631. Most of the objects of art
housed in the church bear references to the Black Death.
The dome of the Salute was an important addition to the
Venice skyline and soon became emblematic of the city, inspiring artists like
Canaletto, J. M. W. Turner, John Singer Sargent, and the Venetian artist
Francesco Guardi. More
on Santa Maria della Salute
Dusan Djukaric was born in Teslic, former Yugoslavia, in 1971. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade, where he still works and lives. For a long time, some two decades, he has been painting frescoes, icons and roof-screens in churches and monasteries, and many of his icons are now part of collections in foreign embassies and diplomatic headquarters.
In the arts world, Dusan Djukaric is known and appreciated for his watercoloursr. As far as the subject matter is concerned, his watercolours paint the world of the artist’s surrounding. There are landscapes of towns and coasts, human figures, nudes, animals. But whatever the themes are, his paintings are equally soft and poetic, with an atmosphere of immediacy and warmth.
Djukaric is subtle and transparent when he paints coasts and seas – beaches, boats, fishermen, ports. These watercolours are full of light, the blueness of the sky and shimmering reflections of the sun against the water surface. With his sense for the subject, he successfully shows the difference between the fleeting nature of the water and the light, opposed to the lasting impression of a stone, a house, a tree.
The colors range from silvery-blue, ochre, to the purple, red and violet tones. The element of light, indispensable in watercolour, helps present a flickering atmosphere that the artist brings to his work. The brush strokes are free, but precise enough not to lose the form of the subject, and still lyrical and fugacious.
Given the difficulty of watercolour as a technique, avoided by most artists, we can only praise the great virtuosity of Dusan Djukaric, who appears to be creating with ease his watercolours full of optimism and beauty. Seeing them will certainly give the audience a fresh breath of good spirit and love for art. More on Dusan Djukaric
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