01 Painting of the Canals of Venice by the artists of their time, with foot notes. #48

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 

Please visit my other blogs: Art Collector, Mythology, Marine Art, Portrait of a Lady, The Orientalist, Art of the Nude and The Canals of Venice, And visit my Boards on Pinterest

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