Renewed landscape

Painting with poetry

Renewed landscape was an exhibition held by the House of culture Črna na Koroškem between the 3rd of December 2021 and the 15th of January 2022. I introduced myself to the local community for the first time.

like fluorescent pink
your love
promised
embodiment of summer

on golden wings
you used to whisper
that I am your angel
thus you became my yellow rose

like a blooming brush
you tickle my neck
and I am happy
and I am sad you are leaving

on the shards of my maturity
I pin you into the sky
with eagles

dress wine moon earth sea

the red allowed me to hug fire
I fight
I yearn for
my red horizon

in your valleys
in your stories
in your musky smell
you tickle me playfully

for you I leave the desert
and abandon the bet

you are my red dot

I want to play forever
with your heartbeat
I want to swing forever
on the branch of your joy
I want to carry you with me forever
lovingly

turquoise from Tibet
and homemade walnut cake
lit the stars tonight

I wandered off in search of treasure
of happiness

from an unknown land
secret
fragments
dance

when I gaze into your rivers
I hear a poem about
September landscape
autumn has never been as plentiful
as this year’s autumn is
yellow

untold dreams of
riders

carnival of gestures
connects me to the world
like poetry

your
imprint
gives
golden fluffs of love

blossoms of your tenderness
calm me
I long
for our intimacy

I heard
the rivers freeze
while the trees cry

I am not a river
but I freeze

in clear innocence
of icy waters
crystals are
like flowers of

the heartiness of your laughter

magic of the night
lifts the sun
above the horizon
of the setting sea

fate is a white bird
flying before winter
bride
the bells already toll

softness
softness
softness
of your tenderness

I brought you birds
to weave a nest
where we could settle

I brought you birds
to chase away your
dark force

sometimes you trample your
heart’s landscape
as if it was
a mute image of words

the heights of longing
smoulder in the wind
with ecstasy
of love

Nina Stopar starts her creative process as a dancer whose immateriality of movement is embodied in colour and line. Thus her paintings are created from an act that is not exclusively painting and whose symbolism is limited here by the written word. The series of paintings on paper titled Renewed Landscape consists of 21 works. Each is accompanied with a poem speaking about intimate experiences and complementing the painting.

Dancer, painter and poet Nina Stopar returns to the world of painting with careful steps. The traces she leaves on the white background meld with the renewed landscape into which she returns reborn. The ephemeral impressions with strong and intense colours do not give the viewer any other way out aside from some ingrained thoughts. Nina builds the associative field with basic artistic tools: trace of the coloured pencil embraces the field of colour and the surface of the painting is adorned with dried flowers seemingly at random. Such composition, built with colour, dry flowers and white background, does not represent an external reality – neither on a symbolic, cosmic, transcendental nor spiritual level.

The paintings do not contain geometric forms – not even straight lines. It seems that the artist is satisfied with the straight edges of the painting, everything within is chaos and intertwining. Due to the organic nature of the painted forms, the temptation to seek tangible meanings is even greater, but it is unnecessary and superfluous. However, the poems that accompany the paintings change everything. Previously abstract, vague compositions, closer to natural disorder and fictional landscapes, now limit the associative flow with the help of poems. Symbols, painted with simple artistic means, connected to the word acquire completely different connotations. Yellow, pink and blue, appearing in the poems as well, evoke in the reader and viewer passionate memories of muttering retreats of restless nights exclusive to female eroticism.

Jernej Kožar