When I moved from the big city to Krk in 1982, I was impressed by the islands landscape and the sea, the narrow streets and old architecture of the tight and minute citadels. Here, everything was new to me. Windows with wooden shutters, stairways of stone, small courts, benches and flowers, decrepit facades of houses wherein nobody lives anymore. The first winter on the island was unusually gentle but permeated with wind – Jugo and Bura, while the sea lost its blue color I acquainted myself with during summer and turned into a color of lead or white. I always love to come back to those motives.
My first solo exhibition was in 1989 in the management premises of JANAF in Omišalj, while in 1990 I got an opportunity to install a solo exhibit in the Gallery Krk – todays Gallery Decumanus as well as in Gallery Toš in Punat.
The self-taught painter Dagmar Franolić developed her aptitude in the techniques of watercolor, what simoultaneously denotes a certain tendency towards translucence and lightness, abstractness and simplicity. It is also possible to wield aquarelle differently, but exactly this characteristics of watercolor suit her.
Born in the north, in Germany, she had to be impressed by the light of the Mediterranean, by the milieus and landscape of a nature entirely different that the one close and known to her. But in her paintings it is evident that this naturalized Krk settler brings in more of her own personality and intimacy than the outer incentive would be crucial in her artistic creation, even tough she thematically guided herself to landscapes and nature.
There are three themes that she occupies herself with – vedute of the city of Krk and its vistas, landscapes and flowers, flora and fauna of the sea bed.
However this paintings are not and are not striving to be just an artistic visualization of outer reality and a reflection of nature, but lyrical impressions of gentle colors and forms, that reveal a woman, a paintress of delicate constitution, whose paintings are like translucent illustrations and sometimes, croquis. The city motives look like vignettes out of fables, the fauna of sea just slightly denotes her origin, while the floral motives transform into phantasmagorias and interlacings in that a certain affinity towards the illustrative and decorative can be sensed. There is a lot of light and brightness here, sometimes lyrical melancholy and subtlety.
Painting of this type is related to a specific stylization and manner of presentation, built on scenes composed as if in dreams, of “different constituents” that don’t fit together in reality, that only paining can unite. Their haziness and poetic lyricism presents itself in occasional seals of identity.
Here there is a more personal vision present and just glimpses of the outer world to be found, then a will to carefully interpret the outer reality and meticulously represent the landscape.
Miniatures
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