WORKS

Dragana Crnjak is serbian-american artist born in former Yugoslavia. She received her M.F.A. in Painting and Printmaking from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia. She is an interdisciplinary artist whose work is primarily based in the medium of painting and processes of drawing. She is a recipient of Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Awards in visual art for 2008, 2011, 2015, Research Professorship from Youngstown State University, and Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Professional Fellowship in drawing. She had taught art at University of Virginia and The Cleveland Institute of Art. She is currently Associate Professor at Youngstown State University, Ohio, teaching painting and drawing.

Cleaning is a part of ordinary everyday life, yet do we really know what cleaning looks like? These drawings are part of a series that records the movements made by sweeping, vacuuming, mopping and washing the floor. Paradoxically, the more lines there are in the drawing, the cleaner we can assume the floor to be, even though the paper is actually dirtier.

I will always remember how totally flabbergasted I was when, during my MA interview, Paul Fieldsend-Danks’s asked me: “Have you ever thought of performance?” The idea of performing filled me with dread so I put it at the back of my mind. Did he plant a seed? I now draw as I live, in the moment. I respond to live music, feeling it through my body and visually interpreting its movement with both hands and spontaneous gestures. The marks created reflect the density of the sounds whilst enhancing the scarcity of the silences. I particularly love improvising to free jazz and sharing the same creative space than the musicians for an ephemeral moment. I attend bi-monthly participatory sessions with musicians exploring mark making in-situ and experimenting with sound making using my drawing tools. Unbeknown to me drawing has become performative. The language of drawing fascinates me.

Although the virtual space of painting and drawing is where all of my projects begin, I frequently find myself in the realms of architecture, interiors, public space and inter-disciplinary collaboration. I view all my works as vivid backdrops for human activity - arenas within which all possibilities may occur. When I draw, I'm testing the virtual space I'm creating on paper against the architecture of the space I'm occupying at the moment. Eccentric, flickering patterns form stage sets, interior and exterior architectures. Pastel and hothouse color, personalized geometry and fragments of texts all conspire to create new spaces for making thoughts visible, and for the free exercise of my imagination.