Janko Brašić
Janko Brašić (Serbian Cyrillic: Јанко Брашић) (9 January 1906 – 15 June 1994) was a Serbian painter considered to be one of the foremost contributors to the naive art genre. He has a world-wide reputation.
Janko Brašić was born in the village of Oparić, in Serbia, where he lived and worked all his life. He started painting when he was a young man of 24 (1933).
In a review of his work, an art critic wrote:
The development of Serbian naive art officially starts with the work of Janko Brašić. His earliest works (portraits) date from 1933. Rustic elementary realism is his way of expressing primordial relations with his surroundings. Lacking professional routine his painting seem bitter and sounding. Scenes are mainly presented in a rural landscape; they possess bright colorization, without explicitly expressed focus. However, the most expressive are his psychological portraits. With almost six decades of fruitful work Janko Brašić will remain the symbol of naive art in Serbia and Oparić will be widely famous as his homeland....
About himself
I made my self-portrait as a testimony so that my fellow-countrymen would stay calm. If I painted someone else they could accuse me of the lack of resemblance since I got the picture and the man whose portrait I had made wouldn't be there for them to see him immediately. Well, this is how it was!… It was easy for me to make the portrait of myself … I looked at myself in the mirror and that's how I painted.
(Quoted from Vreme, May 15, 1935)
See also
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