As a painter, your voice must've been formed by education and all the knowledge acquired. Have you worked hard on keeping your own voice?
As stated in the first sentence, I believe that the artist, above all, must have a quality education, which is constantly bettered with new and fresh knowledge, thus shaping the artistic expression by continuously questioning and reshaping the artist's everyday life. My art education began at the Elementary Music School where I had discovered (or awakened) my passion for art. Although I have replaced music with the fine arts, painting and design, I believe that my music education was crucial for escaping my comfort zone, acquiring work habits and creating my own
artistic expression. Eventually my artistic tendencies changed and evolved, so I decided to pursue different expressions at the High School of Applied Arts, followed by the Academy of Fine Arts – but with the same zeal, ambition and commitment, crafting a mosaic of artistic expressions from
pieces of hard work and determination.
Your latest series of paintings is developed from everyday life, it presents how common it is. Would you elaborate the topic?
I completed my studies during the first wave of COVID-19. These unprecedented circumstances and trying times gave me – and many others – enough time to delve deeper into important matters and topics. I questioned the position of man in modern society. What are the fears, needs and emotions of the modern man? The countless Zoom meetings have helped technology to consume our lives more than ever before. For better or for worse. My interest in the position of man in the present deepened in the following year. I realized that man was living faster than ever before, and felt the need to portray this defiance of time in my paintings. What inspired me were the 'live' pictures on our mobile phones. My paintings presuppose the summing up of time, the moments that are imposed on us, moments which are fast, moments which we are unable to receive and place in a natural chronological order. Information and hazy movements, in contrast, bombard the image from all angles and sides – describing modern life.
You're doing a master's degree in Creative Industries, in Belgrade. How did you choose that
journey?
Considering that connecting the theory and contemporary practice offered by the Faculty of Media and Communication will supplement my previously acquired knowledge at the Academy of Fine Arts in Sarajevo, I applied for a master's degree in Creative Industries. As far as my own experience is concerned, I would say that it is not enough to just understand the theory, the history of art or to know the nature of a particular art medium. Today, in the age of hyper-life, the role of creative industries, the arts in communication and economics is becoming more and more significant. Therefore, it is important to turn cultural needs into interests. Unfortunately, creative
thinking has lost its place. That is the case in my country – Bosnia and Herzegovina. I strongly believe and strive to overturn this phenomena, and therefore have chosen this master's program in order to apply my knowledge and competence to extract art from the forgotten sections of magazines, TV programs and lifeless art exhibitions. I believe that the artist should possess this knowledge so that his works would not remain useless in a dusty corner of his studio.
Digital painting is one of your focuses lately, and since we're living in a digital world, did it
change the ways of communicating the messages?
The works I mentioned in the previous questions speak precisely about the interrelationships of the two concepts: art and technique. The desire to explore digital painting stems from many years of research about traditional media. In my attempt to dissect digital media, I have opted to examine and explore graphic design. This path has definitely altered the way my messages are communicated. If we talk about the context of a work of art, the work itself created in the digital medium is by default different from the traditional one. It is created much faster, inside a virtual studio within which the painter has inexhaustible paints and brushes. Like everything around us, this medium gives us the ability to be faster, more accurate, and allows us to carry the studio anywhere we go as long as we have a drawing tablet by our side. In addition to these features that facilitate the creative process, I always claim that both media can improve, but never replace each other, which means that I will in the foreseeable future create with both a brush and a digital pen.
Follow Ana's work on her Instagram account.
Author: Hana Tiro