Battle Painting

Looking back over an entire opus, over the whole path of life travelled in art, which a monograph of a man, an artist, or an individual implies, a question is raised on the meaning of biographic data, because experiences of life determine the formation of a personality. What has the individual gone through? How has he developed? What has he lived through and experienced, and how has this sensitivity, which will lead him on a constantly turbulent artistic adventure, deepened? Free of any anecdotal proclivity, art history, by also studying the biography of the artist, tries to grasp his artistic opus in order to understand the frame of mind which can in this way become one of the focuses of the themes, motifs and forms of a completed journey, of a completed work. If we determine as the starting point the universal truth that the driving force of every individual who deals with art is his desire to express his view of the world, and to give sense to his own existence, then it is worth seeing in which direction this individuality has developed, and it is worth reconstructing the course of his development. We will not be mistaken if we say that the artist Vladimir Vrljić Ankin knew, at every moment deep inside him, in the light of Schopenhauer’s explanation of the world as will and idea, through an inner call starting in his early youth, how to recognise art as destiny. By discovering this call early on, he did not look back, and he would not have, even had he known how arduous and toilsome, but at the same time passionate and joyful, that call and that path would be. However, in his painting, Ankin did not ponder over fatally pathetic issues, or identify unreservedly the meaning of visual art with the meaning of life. Art is, we have long known this, like breathing, an elementary need to express the world around from the world within, but yet, in interpreting the world, this breathing possesses a great deal of intuitive inspiration in the will to materialise personality assimilating with nature seen through spectacles of colour, and by yielding to the brush. This intuitive foundation expresses pure artistic energy which fertilises itself in the memory of the motif, in favour of allusive and plastic iconic values. An excerpt from the art historians’ monograph Enes Quien