Landscapes of the Soul by Mila Gvardiol
Mila Gvardiol is a visual artist and designer from Belgrade, Serbia. She was born in 1979. She graduated at Faculty of Applied Arts - Applied painting Department in Belgrade where she also took doctoral degree in Digital art within interdisciplinary studies at the University of Arts. Mila is a member of the Association of Fine Artists of Serbia and Association of Applied Arts and Designers of Serbia. She is employed as an Associate Professor at the Academy for Digital Production in Sremska Kamenica, Serbia as well as at the Academy of Applied Arts in Belgrade. Mila has taken part in 33 solo and over 250 group exhibitions, and she participates at international Digital Arts festivals and Fine Arts colonies. Mila has also won many awards for her paintings.
The series of paintings called “Landscapes of the Soul” was created after the death of my father, the painter Goran Gvardiol. I have always been interested in using shapes and colors in my paintings, but I have never entered the world of landscapes. When my father died, I felt the need to paint my own world of landscapes. In the beginning, these were landscapes from my imagination that abounded in lush landscapes and colors. They were dominated by wooded areas with a stream and a hint of wind. As this series progressed and as I became more and more instinctively immersed, as the phase came into being, I began to copy the characters from my father's paintings (figure and birds) and insert them into my landscapes. I felt these characters were guardians, so I called those paintings “Guardians of the Soul”. This whole process of thinking, painting and copying my father's characters helped me to heal my sadness, to say goodbye to my father, and at the same time to preserve his memory.