FEATURED ARTIST: Melita Kraus
Alleviating Suffering with Art
Recently, I found a large piece of paper that I forgot about. I know that with the latest events, one part of my world is over. When I think about the meaning of the Book of Noah, I realize that the point was to create a better world than the old one was. My paper is my Ark. I tried to save the most precious remains of my world in this picture - my youth, love, dreams, my radio, my children, my grandchildren, my pets, my mother's grave, my father's picture. They are the seeds of my future world.
When I am creating my art, my heart is full. There is no place for hate or any negativity. I open the door of my world - a world of stories, songs, nice memories! When I was young, I was part of the hippy generation. We say “Make love, Not war!” Painting is my biggest love.
As a mostly instinctive person, first I do - then I think. For me, that spontaneity in art is most important. It is pure Zen. In life there are no real lines. Parallels and meridians do not really exist. So as with life, we always blur the lines anyway - why not in the arts?
I had a wonderful Persian cat, he was a few years older than my recently passed Lili. They lived and loved each other together. I had to put the cat to sleep last year. Four years ago my mother died after a long and serious illness. My dearest, my children are now living far away from me in different countries. They all inspire me. I have many reason to be sad but I survive through my art!
When people who are suffering create art it brings them freedom. They enter in to the ideal world, in a moment of their own creativity.
Melita Kraus, an artist in Croatia, is a member of Croatian Association of Applied Arts. From 1990 she participated in more than one hundred group exhibitions in country and abroad.
As a successor of a family of Holocaust survivors, she is devoted to revival of Jewish themes in an intellectually liberated manner, transforming the anxiety of nature and a terror of the theme into sophisticated material of art, which is pure and innocent yet bears an attractive stamp of mystery of a world long forgotten.
Some of her finest works are also treasured in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, Croatia and Museum Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, Israel.. https://melitakraus.wixsite.com/jewishart
