strategies of survival

(coping strategies and combination of painting techniques)

Our personality as the sum of different coping strategies that have shaped opportunities and limitations in our lives.

Each painting is an expression of personality, intimate, unrepeatable as the moment in time and indescribable sensation.

Creativity is a process involving subconscious, at any moment changeable, so the painting remains as a record of that special moment.

Sometimes I paint as if I were a computer programmed to make certain number of work of arts in one day, to generate a flow of energy necessary for life. Sometimes my internal driving force makes me paint quickly, intuitively and with confidence that leaves no room for questioning ideas, conveyed messages and content. Information comes to me when the work is completed, as if I was an observer and not the author. I've been a slave of the mentioned internal drive for some time and when my latest paintings are concerned I question these processes, impulses and unrecognizable instincts that direct my brush strokes and sometimes even my thoughts while I paint.

Lena Kramarić

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At the beginning and for the end

Faced with any work of art, observers tend to invest perceptive efforts to fracture the image and its formal - substantive characteristics with the aim of understanding the different aesthetic, ethical, symbolic and individual aspects that the painting is emanating and at the same time transposing recognizable motive in kind of an artistic experience.

The artistic experience is a complex process of shaping a mental perception and artistic language that generates from direct observation of the world with hard to reach sensual substance which the artist seeks to incorporate in a work of art.

Certainly, basics of every artistic activity represent feelings, ideas and conscious search for new motifs; however they incorporate the value of thoughts and emotions thus becoming the true essence of a work of art.

Somewhere along the lines of sensory and genuine knowledge of herself and her life incorporated in the ambience, effort to fit in the banal moulds of reality and imagination lies a new opus of paintings of Lena Kramaric, a painter from Dubrovnik. These are scenes that include only sensual women with fragile figure of a girl and at the same time a woman, sometimes rhythmically arranged next to each other, allowing us to discern them, while elsewhere piled in heaps as for example, in the painting „Where was I this year“ they give us not only a sense of freedom but also emanate disorder and unrest permeated with a sense of maternity and a child's game.

Life and motherhood are the main themes of Lena Kramaric interpreted in a unique form inherent only to her - gentle and poetic female characters on her paintings exist in their own world, not wanting to share intimacy with the surrounding, while on the other hand cry for a conversation and understanding evoking the serenity of life, a never ending battle between the inner, mentally incomprehensible world and the reality of a physical world.

Lena's paintings are like children's drawings, full of naivety, tenderness and storytelling but at the same time realistic, the author is simply playing with ambiguous gestures and signs by introducing a kind of contradiction, as is outlined in her canvas „She is cooking with a brush“. It is a whole series of author's personal associations which contain subtle hints of abstraction resulting from visual illusions and coded meanings enabling us to have an insight into the depth "of her own sentient being."

At the same time the associations are pointing to the dominance of the inconclusive, fragmented and subconscious, but very instinctive and experiential.

Lena Kramaric is an artist imposing her imaginative solutions to the surrounding world, and her paintings are based on the solid form of drawing imaginary constructed space, unusual perspectives and penetration of unexplained forms and elements that keep rearranging into a whole new meaning.

Such metaphysical state of reality expressed through dreamy sensibility Lena substantiates with her individual visual speech resulting from her own sensory inner world.

In order to convey these visions, the artist works spontaneously surrendering to her inner voice, using acrylic paint for impasto and creating a texture on square formats fast and with refined brushstrokes

Lena with her expressionist language and more vibrant colour palette creates an image passing from disturbance to harmony and to spiritualized content with the touch of intriguing and unfettered expression.

Confirmation of this is found in her entire opus - layered and complex compositions harmonized using cold and warm colour tones, especially present in the paintings Mom in the park 1 and Mom in the park 2, white flakes against a blue sky are separated by birthday flags and some occasional splashes of red, yellow and green colours create a feeling of never fully defined artistic sensibility.   

Lena paints with words and her paintings make emotional connection, create a semantic and freestanding unit. This technique can be seen on Torn in pieces or A hedgehog on a leash, she is trying hard to complement the art form with her thoughts, yet she remains true to "reading" of almost every segment of the painting.

The young artist from Dubrovnik incorporates in the fabric of her paintings a controlled peaceful transition from topic to topic highlighting the basic motive, the dominance of female characters voicing her own thoughts. Therefore, there is no end in sight to her themes; on the contrary, her female figures, bearers of motherhood apotheosis strongly confirm that life continues - the love of a mother for her children, but also to the canvas. Thus, she as an artist discovered in a simple motif a complex topic and gave life to seemingly banal symbols, but with enough restraint to leave some space for interpretation of those hidden values arising from the internal perspective on life, play and dreams.

With this opus, Lena Kramaric has proven to be a self-restrained artist who with romantic gestures describes her own desires, emotions and fears using brush strokes and transferring to the canvas her emotions, creating a powerful work breaking through the framework of space and time in which they arise, leaving the impression of something already seen and also something dreamed of, conscious and subconscious.

Andrea Batinić Ivanković