Painter Ljudmila Smiljković

Painter Ljudmila Mihajlićeva - Smiljković, like other Russian painters, comes from the best school in the world, the last one where painting is taught methodically and expertly, as, in fact, are all Russian art schools. Just as in the 1960s a magical circle formed around the painter Mediala in Belgrade, so at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries, Belgrade revealed itself to certain Russian painters as a permanent city, a place where the spirit flourishes. If we look deeper into her paintings, we will see that she knows all the secrets of the artistic craft. Nothing is accidental on these canvases. The faces have no physiognomy because the goal is not to characterize the portrait. She paints girls, young women, heroines of the new age, which is born from the ashes of failed ideologies and totalitarian, male systems. A biologically and aesthetically more advanced being, the femme fatale, the vamp, the model of these images, is ideal and perfect, a ruler who enchants her empire with imagination, magic and intuition. Around her is the vortex of the world, which she manages with magic and only her own logic. Centuries pass, empires crumble, but she is upright and always in the center of attention. The figures in these pictures participate in some ancient mysteries, but they also come from the present time. These may be women from everyday life, but something of goddesses, high priestesses and holy dancers can also be seen in them. Everything that accompanies them in the painter's world, objects, plants, animals, architecture, is given in challenging forms and compositions, such as sensual and bright color. It is an art that celebrates the body and beauty but also opens up to the visionary, expressive or fantastic. As painting of a symbolic nature, of various iconographic levels, it enables a dialogue between the world and the image, the artist and the work, the body and the work. Contributing to the idea of painting as a ceremony and celebration, Ljudmila Mihajlićeva - Smiljković revealed her poetics of secret femininity. Again elegance and eroticism are the subject of art, coming from the eternal principle. Painting returns, or perhaps goes ahead of its time, in representations that best suit the nature of art.