When I think about my favorite painters, I think about Marc Chagall and Ana Knjazovic. But what could have in common one Belorussian Jew, born in Vitebsk, who became world famous in luminous Paris, and one Slovakian female artist from Kovačica – a neat little town lying amidst the endless Vojvodina plain? Art historians may notice many common features in the poetics of these two artists, in their coloring and their exceptional aesthetics, while for the laymen like us, the thing that connect them is simply exciting and enchanting beauty of their artwork.

As it happens, only in Serbia is Kovačica not affirmed enough; a little town sleeping for a few months in a white dream, and then churned up by the yellow and green vangoghian wheat fields. In the art world, however, everyone knows about this picturesque Slovak and Serb settlement, where almost every house is a small painting studio or workshop for manufacturing national musical instruments, chairs, tripods, corn husk dolls, hand painted pumpkins, enchanting embroidery and many other artisanal handicrafts. For Slovakia, Kovačica is a kind of miracle, because Slovaks do not have, and never had oases like this; an artistic and ethnographic phenomenon, that found a fertile soil in Serbia, a sparkling rain of heavenly gifts, which came down on Kovačica, all warm and starry as a sign of prosperity of nature and spirit.

In this ethnos within ethnos and cosmos within cosmos, where peasant women with rosy cheeks still wear five petticoats under their skirts and cover their heads with colorful kerchiefs with starched laces or enormous woolen scarves, people still ride bicycles with baskets out of which goosenecks’ heads stick out, in this God’s garden house the Knjazovic art family is probably the most prominent and the most renowned one.

Jan Knjazovic (1925-1985) was the founder of the family art tree and an artist with extraordinary talent, heartfelt emotions and gentleness that won the hearts of his fellow citizens and art critics. He painted solely by heart, and because of that Jan Knjazovic signed his paintings with one heart and a letter „K“, while his daughter Ana added another heart to her paintings, and his granddaughter Nataša (also a painter) the third one, so the heart of this wonderful artist kept beating and continued that stream of colors, singing wedding parties, dances, musicians, swings, lively markets and cheerful young peasants, intoxicated with the Dionysian joy of life. I am avoiding sad motives, because I am an optimist by nature, said Jan. Together with Martin Jonaš and widely known Zuzana Chalupova, Jan Knjazovic become a symbol of the Kovačica naive art – unique and world renowned school of traditional folk art.

However, Jan’s kingdom is not like the other naive artists’ kingdoms of the sun, but rather the kingdom of the moon, where nights and days are given a cobalt-blue color with addition of surrealistic shapes of characters in motion. Jan Knjazovic could not know (nor he was interested) about the fact that he unknowingly introduced modernism into his paintings (The Blue Nights cycle) and thus infringed some of the holy artistic canons. Knjazovic has found his own shape of the house and tree, man and animal – regardless of their actual appearance he would coat them in blue, red or purple color by his own idea. By adding the light he emphasized power of the color, focused attention to certain shapes and dematerialized the space. Earth and the sky merged into a unique space, where people and animals float. (Marica Vračević, curator of Museum of Naive and Marginal Art, Jagodina)

But Ana Knjazovic (1950), my favorite Ana went even further in that somnambulistic game, erasing the border between heaven and earth. Unlike the humble Jan, Ana’s got a burning passion, and her paintings, with its bright and clear colors, are always erotically marked and deeply connected with the atavistic and chthonic human urges. Complete artwork of Ana is an ode to love – pure, pristine, Edenlike. In her magical blue night, the lips of young peasants are lustfully seeking women in love; their bodies are intertwined with the croups of the fairy horses, prancing furiously in a sparkling of the horseshoes and embers. Pigeons are pecking the pigeon hens; large roosters with eagle-like wings are bringing „good news” instead of Archangel Gabriel, while carrying a compact little village with small houses, bell house and a cross on their tails. A tree grows from the giant corn cob of warm orange and yellow colors – it is often a swing for lovers or a balk on which the magnificent bay horses and white, gray, dappled, roan and chestnut stallions are dancing – the horses that can be found only in fairy tales. Ana’s characters are born from the eggs, in the miraculous resurrection of the Old and New Testament, while the running horses with long, wavy manes are carrying large, ostrich-like eggshells.

Horses are sacred animals for Ana, like totems; marvelous and playful, overjoyed while pulling with their tails a crescent moon and a sleeping girl with her knees spread, the pigeon and the whole little village as well. On one miniature painting, even the granny mounts an angry red mare and flies high above the white chimneys like some apparition or a ghost. The horses are coming out of the river after the flood; the horses perform their love dance on the rooftops of the village cob houses and huts; winged horses are breaking loose with the neigh and flying up to the sky; beautiful unicorns appearing from some archetypical dream; the horses are carrying the crescent shaped world, big as a half of watermelon instead of the elephants, which carried the earth’s plates, long time ago.

Naive artists create in the pre-prayer gardens, by that part of the human being which does not know holiness, but there is a precognition and yearning for it. They create in such way that the vivified love on their paintings is a great passion of a human being which loves all those human and divine characteristics that can’t be found anywhere else. Because for a human-naive painter God is not born yet. It is inside of him. He just needs to dig into that well of stars. With paints. (Sanja Domazet, Shadows)

A day on Ana’s paintings is a small yellow sun, just a slightly bigger than the pea, while the night is a slice of the moon and the background is always the same – ultramarine, and that’s the only setting Ana knows about, while the light comes from within, from her characters shaded by a thin white lines. Ana’s landscape – if you can call it a landscape – are few houses tucked together tightly, tiny as a box of matches; village has just one tree with the few branches and several fuzzy berries, similar to the Beckett’s tree-symbol, the only living thing in his famous existentialist drama about waiting. There is no grass, no flowers, no children and no large flakes of snow, like on the others characteristic naive paintings. There are no scenes of work on fields, tillers, harvesters, millers or washerwomen. Her paintings are the fireworks of senses and one big love feast (where lovers invite only horses, roosters, pigeons and dogs), the nature survival and the extending of species with animal roars and instincts.

A drawing is supple and reduced to its essence, the form is solid, full and rough, the anatomy is simplified and the movement is rigid; color harmony is conditioned by intimate mood and revived by a subtle toned overpainting; the light does not depend on the light source, but it is rather determined by some inner strength and logic; the space on the painting is most frequently resolved by the law of golden ratio, while the composition is always balanced. A dream is always ahead of the reality, an imagination masters the reality. (Nikola Kusovac)

Ana’s colors are ultramarine with ebony glow, intensive and aromatic color of cyclamens, oriental orchids and lilies; mystical dark purple, then pomegranate red, amber yellow, color of the liquid gold, honey orange and jade green. Ana jealously preserves her iconography; there are no „strange” allegories and parables in her expression, it just varies infinitely. You will recognize her paintings in each room and in the crowded gallery, because they are totally authentic, which is something difficult for the naive painter to achieve; and given that her surrealist and expressionist style overcomes mentioned spheres, we can say that she is a unique artist from our country.

While Ana is eruptive and too passionate for a woman, Nataša Knjazovic (1977) is a gentle, sensual, pastel. Natasha’s nudes are almost chaste compared to Ana’s constantly veiled peasant women with spread knees, elbows and lips. Nataša Knjazovic comes out of naive and enters her own surreal space of dream visions. Her world is a world of beautiful lonely ladies, who collect butterflies and play cello; a world of unreal princesses, who let down their hair from the top of the lonesome tower for the most daring suitors. In that world there are lovers riding flying bicycles over the sunflower fields, or driving Russian troika through the snowy wastelands of Vojvodina. Behind Nataša’s mirror you can also found cheerfully-sad Harlequins, circus acrobats and clowns, rabbits out of the hats and a carousel for the Crystal Palace lady.

Her sound of love is subtle; it requires a lot of effort and a ladder to reach the loved one, to reach the sun, like the ladder of Lazarus reaching the endless sky. Nataša’s paintings are filled with the naive childish loves, toys, dolls, hop scotches, music boxes, lollipops, cherries in bloom. In her paintings there is a chronoscope of cyclic changes of the light and darkness, seasons, but there isn’t any aging process. Her fairy like ladies almost never leave the fairytale childhood and girlhood age, they always look like virgins. I guess no other painter has so much nudity with so much harmless innocence in it. Nataša is also a modern painter, but her futurism is more like the Renaissance drawings of the airplanes, balloons and submarines. She is hopelessly in love with the old laces, veils and tulles, hand held fans and peacock feathers.

Among all the painters from Knjazovic family, Nataša is actually the closest to Chagall, because of carnival atmosphere, the masks and marionettes, the vista of the twins and look-alikes and nearly identical colors. Her most frequent motives are ladders, by which her characters are reaching for the sun (as the pagan deity, but also God), then the chess boards, the chess squares on the floors of the palaces and chambers like a black-and-white dichotomy of the world, of good and evil. From her perspective, the houses are often turned inside out, the rooms are upside down and the earth globe hangs above the head of an amazed young man, who is trying to reach the apple, which is nailed to the globe, to the earth. There are also swings, ballet shoes, flocks of sheep like cotton bolls and a barely visible water wells under the young honeymooners with small white wings growing under their armpits, flying high above the fields, trees and meadows. And, of course, butterflies – ethereal, airy symbols of passing beauty, fleeting like a game and eternal as desire. They add lightness to her canvas, color of the air and scent of powder. A variety of biblical motives like churches and crosses are disguised in surrealism; umbrellas are used instead of parachutes for that first and crucial fall of man, unique compositions of the sun and the moon that shine together like today and tomorrow, present and eternity – eschatology. There are seeds of dissent, apples and poppies and heavenly nudity of a man and nature. Music on Nataša’s paintings is also inevitable: her girls are playing violin, flute and cello on a trapeze. The most immaterial and subtle of all arts gives that special tune to these canvases.

Nataša Knjazovic, a “third heart” in the family, takes the elements of her mother’s and grandfather’s visual poetics, and these elements are perfectly shaped thanks to relatively long family practice. (Slobodan Stevanovski)

Nataša Knjazović Mijailović was baptized in the Orthodox Church, and with all the blessing she is also an icon painter. We can correctly assume that her icons are also made with the vivid colors of resurrection and that the characters of the saints have dear, big eyes and bright expression. The most frequent character is the Saint Paraskeva – patroness of women, a wonderful helper and a consoler of the Serbian people. Naive art has many similarities with the icon painting in clear colors, bright characters, reduced dynamics of movement, the original approach and the purity of heart and mind – and the Orthodox religion is based on these values.

To own the paintings of some naive artist from Kovačica is – like their gallerist Pavel Babka says – a matter of good taste and a prestige. I agree with him. To own some canvas from the Knjazovic atelier is a privilege.

Slavica Jovanović