Zoran Zivotic was born in Belgrade in 1962. While studying at the Faculty of Organizational Sciences, he took an interest into painting in 1980, creating watercolour paintings. By the mid-80s painting becomes his main interest, he starts attending art schools and painting soon becomes his main professional effort, while he participates in group exhibitions and soon in individual ones as well.
Other than painting, he also did a lot of humanitarian work, organizing auctions of paintings and art colonies, and at one point he even owned a restoration workshop for antique furniture.
The art of Zoran Zivotic is strongly associated with the motif of the landscape, in all its shapes and forms. He paints nature scenes with the same love, regardless of the season or the time of the day. He is in love with the intact landscapes that bear no traces of human presence. The only thing lacking in his art are the motifs of the sea – like many other artists, he paints his surrounding and his native landscape.
There he finds his way perfectly, painting bright, sunlit meadows, creeks, forests, country roads, with a lonely tree or a shrub here and there. He has dedicated many paintings to the forest motif, where the birch tree prevails, vivid and attractive in its beauty. Behind the trees in the background a soft, misty light comes trough, so the contrast in the painting is somewhat dimmed. Only the elements in the foreground are painted in a sharp and distinctive way.
He paints winter nature scenes perhaps more than other painters do. Those paintings depict perfectly the winter idyll where he never fails to bathe everything in sunlight and to make the winter season more appealing. His way of treating the winter landscapes is reminiscent of 19th century Russian painters. Along with these bright and coloristically colder paintings, Zivotic also does paintings of very warm tones, with plenty of ocher, orange and brown tones, representing the colors of summer and autumn. The spring, as a season, is also represented in many of his paintings, with its abundance of green and bluish colours.
It can be ascertained that Zivotic is a true colourist, but also that each and every one of his paintings can be defined by its the predominant colour. He paints freely and in one breath – in one layer he covers the surface with rich paste. He prefers the spatula to the brush, which shows his great ability to correctly shape the intended form and to bring it to life using this secondary art tool.
The consistency in the choice of motifs and colors remains true, making Zivotic a true representative of the landscape art and its seminal beauty. By contemplating his art, we wish that the nature never changes, for its own sake, but for our sake as well.
