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.
Dusan’s latest work in watercolour can be found in many galleries and private collections. He has participated in various group exhibitions and has had many individual ones, particularly important are his exhibitions in Belgrade, in the Progres Gallery in 2005 and in the Ethnographic Museum in 2006. Djukaric is a member of the Association of Fine and Applied Arts and is featured in the book “A Study on the Theory of the Realistic Art of the World and in Serbia in the 20th Century”. He has won several awards as well.
In the arts world, Dusan Djukaric is known and appreciated for his watercolours, which, once seen, remain in one’s memory forever. 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.
In the urban motifs we often recognize streets and parts of Belgrade which we pass every day, but now we see them in a different light and in different colors. The city hustle and the grayness of the streets have a new look and a surprising artistic content. Everything is more colorful than usual, and the misty atmosphere in the background renders the form even gentler.
Djukaric is even more 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. Here the artist shows the most skill, his keen eye and skilled hand. 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.
Dusan also paints human figures, nudes and animals, all with equal success. A rooster with his giant purple crest, a cat with its eyes wide open in wonder, those are the paintings that only a person who truly knows the soul of an animal and is a master of watercolour can paint.
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.
