RAIN DANCESELECTED RECENT WORKS BY VIKTOR MITICCole Swanson / Gary Michael Dault / Ewan Whyte / Earl Miller

RAIN DANCESELECTED RECENT WORKS BY VIKTOR MITIC

RAIN DANCESELECTED RECENT WORKS BY VIKTOR MITIC

FOR ANSEL, ANA AND AZUSA

RAIN DANCEViktor Mitic

Published in 2011 byFourfront Editions An imprint of Quattro Books Inc.89 Pinewood AvenueToronto, Ontario, M6C 2V2www.quattrobooks.ca

EditorAllan Briesmaster

PhotographyJohn DrajewiczAzusa Yamamoto

DesignKaKiCreative.com

Printed byPhoenix Press Sdn. Bhd.Penang, Malaysia

Copyright © 2011 Viktor Mitic

The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, or otherwise stored in an electronic retrieval system without the prior consent (as applicable) of the individual author or the designer, is an infringement of the copyright law.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Mitic, ViktorRain dance / artwork by Viktor Mitic.

ISBN 978-1-926802-66-4

1. Mitic, Viktor. 2. Rain and rainfall in art. 3. Chance in art. 4. Painting, Canadian--21st century. I. Title.

ND249.M537A4 2011 759.11 C2011-904001-8

FOR ANSEL, ANA AND AZUSA

RAIN DANCEViktor Mitic

Published in 2011 byFourfront Editions An imprint of Quattro Books Inc.89 Pinewood AvenueToronto, Ontario, M6C 2V2www.quattrobooks.ca

EditorAllan Briesmaster

PhotographyJohn DrajewiczAzusa Yamamoto

DesignKaKiCreative.com

Printed byPhoenix Press Sdn. Bhd.Penang, Malaysia

Copyright © 2011 Viktor Mitic

The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, or otherwise stored in an electronic retrieval system without the prior consent (as applicable) of the individual author or the designer, is an infringement of the copyright law.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Mitic, ViktorRain dance / artwork by Viktor Mitic.

ISBN 978-1-926802-66-4

1. Mitic, Viktor. 2. Rain and rainfall in art. 3. Chance in art. 4. Painting, Canadian--21st century. I. Title.

ND249.M537A4 2011 759.11 C2011-904001-8

CONTENTS 06 INTRODUCTION

08

10

12 RAIN DANCE: RECENT PAINTINGS BY VIKTOR MITIC

14 VIKTOR MITIC: GOING AROUND AND COMING AROUND

16 COLOURED DREAMS, VISUAL MUSIC: THE RAIN PAINTINGS OF VIKTOR MITIC

18 VIKTOR MITIC: RAIN DANCE

VIKTOR MITIC’S RAIN PAINTINGS: PARADOX IN A DELUGE

VIKTOR MITIC: PAINT AS PAINT

20 TRANSLUCENT

52 STRIPES

60 RAIN

70 TEXTURE

80 FLOW

100 GRAFT

110 EARTH

124 ARTIST’S BIODATA

126 ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

128 CODA: A PARTIAL VM ARCHIVE

136 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

CONTENTS 06 INTRODUCTION

08

10

12 RAIN DANCE: RECENT PAINTINGS BY VIKTOR MITIC

14 VIKTOR MITIC: GOING AROUND AND COMING AROUND

16 COLOURED DREAMS, VISUAL MUSIC: THE RAIN PAINTINGS OF VIKTOR MITIC

18 VIKTOR MITIC: RAIN DANCE

VIKTOR MITIC’S RAIN PAINTINGS: PARADOX IN A DELUGE

VIKTOR MITIC: PAINT AS PAINT

20 TRANSLUCENT

52 STRIPES

60 RAIN

70 TEXTURE

80 FLOW

100 GRAFT

110 EARTH

124 ARTIST’S BIODATA

126 ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

128 CODA: A PARTIAL VM ARCHIVE

136 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Everyone else, when it rains, opens an umbrella or – like Gene Kelly in Singing in the Rain opens it and immediately closes it again, content to regard the downpour as a sort of meteorological equivalent (the rainy gift of grace) of his newfound ecstasy at discovering love.

For painter Viktor Mitic, getting caught in the rain with a painted canvas is always both a source of anxiety and the advent of a bracing opportunity: episodes of rain and paint, danger and delight, coexistent in time. Avec moi, le deluge.

Mitic is the kind of artist – and there are many in history – who welcomes certain sorts of usable interference (some of the writers of the essays in this book use the word “serendipity” for this kind of happy aesthetic opportunism) into the realm of making. Where Jackson Pollock once famously stated that he “denied the accident,” Mitic, on the contrary, appears to thrive on accidents, bending them, if possible, to his aesthetic will. Rain is an accident. Everybody talks about the weather, but, as a friend of Mark Twain's (Charles Dudley Warner) once said, “Nobody ever does anything about it.”

– Well, the weather isn't the stuff of jokes anymore not in a world of tsunamis and radical climate change – but it's still a constant, it's still everywhere with us (rain is rain, even if it's acid rain), and for Mitic to utilize rain as a medium adjacent to his painting proper is to participate in the almost hubristic act of collaborating with nature, even to the extent of claiming rain as a painting tool.

Painting with a downpour is a two-way street for Mitic: on the one hand, he appears to relish what expressive effects a fall of rain can perpetrate upon a wet painting; on the other hand, he often has to rush in and modify or repair the rain damage before the painting becomes unusable.

This is analogous, in a way, to Pollock's decision – which would occur at one step removed from the actual act of painting – to keep or to junk a painting, depending on whether or not, in the course if its making, it had retained freshness and pictorial integrity or whether it had simply run to mud. This is a stance whereby the critical act takes place not moment by moment as the artist works, but at some remove from the work – in the course of a creative step backwards from the theatre of immediate experience.

–

6 INTRODUCTION

Gary Michael DaultNapanee, Ontario, April 16, 2011

For Mitic, and other artists who have embraced the vagaries and glorious surprises of distancing as an artistic credo and working procedure (think of all those Dadaists and Surrealists, Abstract Expressionists and Conceptual artists who have rallied around chance and accident in their work), permitting and encouraging incursions into the act of art from outside it is tantamount to forcing – willing – a kind of inventiveness, to generating a legislated newness.

“How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” remarked novelist E.M. Forster. And I venture that more or less the same kind of puckish, fecund perplexity might well fuel the production of a painter like Viktor Mitic: how does he know what he's making until he sees himself (from a certain calculated, rain-drenched distance) in the act of making it?

RAIN DANCE 7

RAIN DANCE:AN INTRODUCTION

Everyone else, when it rains, opens an umbrella or – like Gene Kelly in Singing in the Rain opens it and immediately closes it again, content to regard the downpour as a sort of meteorological equivalent (the rainy gift of grace) of his newfound ecstasy at discovering love.

For painter Viktor Mitic, getting caught in the rain with a painted canvas is always both a source of anxiety and the advent of a bracing opportunity: episodes of rain and paint, danger and delight, coexistent in time. Avec moi, le deluge.

Mitic is the kind of artist – and there are many in history – who welcomes certain sorts of usable interference (some of the writers of the essays in this book use the word “serendipity” for this kind of happy aesthetic opportunism) into the realm of making. Where Jackson Pollock once famously stated that he “denied the accident,” Mitic, on the contrary, appears to thrive on accidents, bending them, if possible, to his aesthetic will. Rain is an accident. Everybody talks about the weather, but, as a friend of Mark Twain's (Charles Dudley Warner) once said, “Nobody ever does anything about it.”

– Well, the weather isn't the stuff of jokes anymore not in a world of tsunamis and radical climate change – but it's still a constant, it's still everywhere with us (rain is rain, even if it's acid rain), and for Mitic to utilize rain as a medium adjacent to his painting proper is to participate in the almost hubristic act of collaborating with nature, even to the extent of claiming rain as a painting tool.

Painting with a downpour is a two-way street for Mitic: on the one hand, he appears to relish what expressive effects a fall of rain can perpetrate upon a wet painting; on the other hand, he often has to rush in and modify or repair the rain damage before the painting becomes unusable.

This is analogous, in a way, to Pollock's decision – which would occur at one step removed from the actual act of painting – to keep or to junk a painting, depending on whether or not, in the course if its making, it had retained freshness and pictorial integrity or whether it had simply run to mud. This is a stance whereby the critical act takes place not moment by moment as the artist works, but at some remove from the work – in the course of a creative step backwards from the theatre of immediate experience.

–

6 INTRODUCTION

Gary Michael DaultNapanee, Ontario, April 16, 2011

For Mitic, and other artists who have embraced the vagaries and glorious surprises of distancing as an artistic credo and working procedure (think of all those Dadaists and Surrealists, Abstract Expressionists and Conceptual artists who have rallied around chance and accident in their work), permitting and encouraging incursions into the act of art from outside it is tantamount to forcing – willing – a kind of inventiveness, to generating a legislated newness.

“How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” remarked novelist E.M. Forster. And I venture that more or less the same kind of puckish, fecund perplexity might well fuel the production of a painter like Viktor Mitic: how does he know what he's making until he sees himself (from a certain calculated, rain-drenched distance) in the act of making it?

RAIN DANCE 7

RAIN DANCE:AN INTRODUCTION

Viktor Mitic's Rain Paintings stem from a 2006 chance encounter with rain: Mitic was caught in a warm summer downpour while painting a large canvas in a parking lot. The effect of the rain on the paint was remarkably transformative.

Mitic was painting outdoors simply because he did not have a studio large enough to accommodate his canvases, which can be as large as 8 x 16 feet. Traveling like an urban nomad through a city with a dearth of studio space, he works where he can, in parking lots and in back alleys, as well as on private property, resulting at times in prompt eviction. While both property owners and passersby might suspect he is painting graffiti, he is actually painting abstracts.

These abstract paintings bear a sharp internal contrast between history and the immediate. They are informed by decades of acquired art historic knowledge but are painted with the performative spontaneity of working on the street in a rainstorm. Such contrast, or paradox, is the crux of Mitic's Rain Paintings. Consider here that as well as placing traditional studio painting against post-studio painting, Mitic juxtaposes nature both with art and with urbania, and most importantly, he juxtaposes art historic allusions with the unplanned outcome of using rain as a medium.

Earl Miller

On that pivotal rainy day, once water droplets on the painting evaporated and the paint dried, Mitic noticed that the canvas had undergone a nearly alchemical change. For one thing, the rain gave the paint an intrinsic fluidity. Moreover, raindrop marks in various parts of the painting etched into the paint, merged with it, pooled it, and built up its texture. Later, Mitic unsuccessfully tried to recreate the rain's effect with a water hose as well as with tap water. Accordingly, he began to paint in the rain as a de rigueur practice.

To reap the best results from rain, Mitic paints with oils because the rain separates pigment from oil, altering the paint's consistency. “Some people use more turpentine, thicker or thinner brushes, a thinner medium. I have this medium...called acid rain,” Mitic notes wryly. Further trying to harness an unpredictable element, Mitic employs a blowtorch to dry the paint quickly when he has achieved desired effects.

Despite Mitic having some control, raindrops inextricably alter his paintings – even their good sections. He must continuously rebuild compositions where the rain has washed the paint away. An ongoing cycle of building, collapse and restoration integrates the rain marks with the abstract images. Paintings such as Constellation Fragments (ref. page 24) show prominent concave drips whose edges

are built up with textured paint. He often leaves such raindrop effects where he wants to develop rough textures. Here is where rain, as Mitic puts it, “interacts” with paint.

The raindrops may interact, but they also impose: letting rain fall on canvas violates the preciousness of a painting. Mitic realizes that despite a painting being stretched, framed and exhibited, it still has been dragged around in the rain. In this sense, the rain's mark-making recalls his previous series of works, titled Bullet Paintings, which also attacked the sanctimony of painting – albeit more aggressively. This series of painted portraits, including a darkly ironical one of John Lennon (38 Special, 2009, ref. page 134), Mitic defined both visually and conceptually by the aggressive outlines of real bullet holes he fired at the paintings on a target practice range.

The applied notions of imposition and interaction, that is to say, of at times relinquishing control to the whims of the elements and at other times maintaining some control over them, again indicate how paradox is integral to Mitic's work. Such paradox makes him a difficult artist to categorize. He can be deemed a plein air painter, yet not in the same way that Impressionist plein air painters were: for them, nature was a subject not a medium, and the studio was never abandoned – just intermittently vacated. In fact, Mitic's

VIKTOR MITIC’SRAIN PAINTINGS: PARADOXIN A DELUGE

8 PARADOX IN A DELUGE

dependence on outdoor sites for the right weather conditions relates to the post-studio practice of artists such as Daniel Buren, or even Robert Smithson and other earth artists who work responsively to public sites. Nevertheless, unlike post-studio artists, Mitic makes abstract paintings rife with art history that, indeed, point back, through allusion, to studio painting.

Two crucial sets of influence respectively relate to the paradox of spontaneous but art historically aware painting that is Mitic's art. The randomness of Mitic's painting recalls the process artists of the mid-1960s – Bruce Nauman, Robert Morris, Richard Serra et al – who viewed process as more important than finished product. Mitic, like the process artists, references Jackson Pollock's drip paintings by allowing rain to fall on his paintings. Alluding to Pollock's action painting, Mitic stresses, “Rain stops the thought process. You're right in the action.” Conversely, Pollock maintained some conscious control over where the paint would spill while Mitic permits rain to maintain its serendipity, an approach more comparable to Duchampian chance – another precedent process artists cite. Accordingly, Mitic can be said to reverse Jackson Pollock's famous pronouncement, “I Am Nature,” when he shows by his practice that he is decidedly not nature: he does not try to take over nature's role; instead, he grants it independence.

Again, like process artists, who would leave materials exposed to weather, temperature and the elements, Mitic incorporates the ephemerality and randomness of rain into the art process. Yet veering sharply away from the approach of process and other artists emerging in the 1960s who wished to abandon painting and its history, Mitic revels in it.

The artists influencing Mitic's painting who come from a range of movements beyond process and post-studio art are connected in their attempts to produce art free of conscious predetermination. Mitic adds to their attempts “to erase the thought process if possible.” Notably informing Mitic are André Breton, André Masson and other Surrealists' automatic drawing, along with the Canadian Automatistes. Additionally, he references those influenced by Surrealism, particularly the late Surrealist Roberto Matta or the Surrealist-influenced Paul Klee, who were working with near abstraction. For instance, in Untitled #9 (ref. page 108) dark blue and rusty orange rectangles or circles, both defined by sharp cutout-like edges, recall Paul Klee's crypto-symbolic forms.

Such historic awareness to achieve a lack of conscious control further marks paradox as central to Viktor Mitic's Rain Paintings. After all, his paradoxical, or one could even say, mixed constructions of approaches and influences show him to be an optimistic experimenter in an age when experimentation by way of further exploring linear art historic paths has arguably been exhausted. Certainly, process art has independently evolved to where process art’s materials are too often chosen to compete for attention via outrageousness and controversy – from making drawings with snail trails or painting with elephant dung. High abstraction, already carried to its formal apogee a half-century ago in Ad Reinhardt's era, remains in a perpetual fin de siècle where deconstructed abstract painting repeatedly, hence predictably, announces the death of Modernism. Buoying such art world cynicism is a glut of cheerfully content-free decorative abstraction. Embraced by suburban galleries and the novice collectors they depend upon, such utterly bad Modernist painting certainly supports Clement Greenberg's late Depression-era thesis advanced in his touchstone Avant-Garde and Kitsch essay: that avant-garde movements with time peter down to kitsch. Mitic, adapting post-modern approaches of juxtaposition, incompatibility and fragmentation to produce new painting, thankfully remixes 20th century art to circumvent and surpass moribund unilateral art movements.

RAIN DANCE 9

Viktor Mitic's Rain Paintings stem from a 2006 chance encounter with rain: Mitic was caught in a warm summer downpour while painting a large canvas in a parking lot. The effect of the rain on the paint was remarkably transformative.

Mitic was painting outdoors simply because he did not have a studio large enough to accommodate his canvases, which can be as large as 8 x 16 feet. Traveling like an urban nomad through a city with a dearth of studio space, he works where he can, in parking lots and in back alleys, as well as on private property, resulting at times in prompt eviction. While both property owners and passersby might suspect he is painting graffiti, he is actually painting abstracts.

These abstract paintings bear a sharp internal contrast between history and the immediate. They are informed by decades of acquired art historic knowledge but are painted with the performative spontaneity of working on the street in a rainstorm. Such contrast, or paradox, is the crux of Mitic's Rain Paintings. Consider here that as well as placing traditional studio painting against post-studio painting, Mitic juxtaposes nature both with art and with urbania, and most importantly, he juxtaposes art historic allusions with the unplanned outcome of using rain as a medium.

Earl Miller

On that pivotal rainy day, once water droplets on the painting evaporated and the paint dried, Mitic noticed that the canvas had undergone a nearly alchemical change. For one thing, the rain gave the paint an intrinsic fluidity. Moreover, raindrop marks in various parts of the painting etched into the paint, merged with it, pooled it, and built up its texture. Later, Mitic unsuccessfully tried to recreate the rain's effect with a water hose as well as with tap water. Accordingly, he began to paint in the rain as a de rigueur practice.

To reap the best results from rain, Mitic paints with oils because the rain separates pigment from oil, altering the paint's consistency. “Some people use more turpentine, thicker or thinner brushes, a thinner medium. I have this medium...called acid rain,” Mitic notes wryly. Further trying to harness an unpredictable element, Mitic employs a blowtorch to dry the paint quickly when he has achieved desired effects.

Despite Mitic having some control, raindrops inextricably alter his paintings – even their good sections. He must continuously rebuild compositions where the rain has washed the paint away. An ongoing cycle of building, collapse and restoration integrates the rain marks with the abstract images. Paintings such as Constellation Fragments (ref. page 24) show prominent concave drips whose edges

are built up with textured paint. He often leaves such raindrop effects where he wants to develop rough textures. Here is where rain, as Mitic puts it, “interacts” with paint.

The raindrops may interact, but they also impose: letting rain fall on canvas violates the preciousness of a painting. Mitic realizes that despite a painting being stretched, framed and exhibited, it still has been dragged around in the rain. In this sense, the rain's mark-making recalls his previous series of works, titled Bullet Paintings, which also attacked the sanctimony of painting – albeit more aggressively. This series of painted portraits, including a darkly ironical one of John Lennon (38 Special, 2009, ref. page 134), Mitic defined both visually and conceptually by the aggressive outlines of real bullet holes he fired at the paintings on a target practice range.

The applied notions of imposition and interaction, that is to say, of at times relinquishing control to the whims of the elements and at other times maintaining some control over them, again indicate how paradox is integral to Mitic's work. Such paradox makes him a difficult artist to categorize. He can be deemed a plein air painter, yet not in the same way that Impressionist plein air painters were: for them, nature was a subject not a medium, and the studio was never abandoned – just intermittently vacated. In fact, Mitic's

VIKTOR MITIC’SRAIN PAINTINGS: PARADOXIN A DELUGE

8 PARADOX IN A DELUGE

dependence on outdoor sites for the right weather conditions relates to the post-studio practice of artists such as Daniel Buren, or even Robert Smithson and other earth artists who work responsively to public sites. Nevertheless, unlike post-studio artists, Mitic makes abstract paintings rife with art history that, indeed, point back, through allusion, to studio painting.

Two crucial sets of influence respectively relate to the paradox of spontaneous but art historically aware painting that is Mitic's art. The randomness of Mitic's painting recalls the process artists of the mid-1960s – Bruce Nauman, Robert Morris, Richard Serra et al – who viewed process as more important than finished product. Mitic, like the process artists, references Jackson Pollock's drip paintings by allowing rain to fall on his paintings. Alluding to Pollock's action painting, Mitic stresses, “Rain stops the thought process. You're right in the action.” Conversely, Pollock maintained some conscious control over where the paint would spill while Mitic permits rain to maintain its serendipity, an approach more comparable to Duchampian chance – another precedent process artists cite. Accordingly, Mitic can be said to reverse Jackson Pollock's famous pronouncement, “I Am Nature,” when he shows by his practice that he is decidedly not nature: he does not try to take over nature's role; instead, he grants it independence.

Again, like process artists, who would leave materials exposed to weather, temperature and the elements, Mitic incorporates the ephemerality and randomness of rain into the art process. Yet veering sharply away from the approach of process and other artists emerging in the 1960s who wished to abandon painting and its history, Mitic revels in it.

The artists influencing Mitic's painting who come from a range of movements beyond process and post-studio art are connected in their attempts to produce art free of conscious predetermination. Mitic adds to their attempts “to erase the thought process if possible.” Notably informing Mitic are André Breton, André Masson and other Surrealists' automatic drawing, along with the Canadian Automatistes. Additionally, he references those influenced by Surrealism, particularly the late Surrealist Roberto Matta or the Surrealist-influenced Paul Klee, who were working with near abstraction. For instance, in Untitled #9 (ref. page 108) dark blue and rusty orange rectangles or circles, both defined by sharp cutout-like edges, recall Paul Klee's crypto-symbolic forms.

Such historic awareness to achieve a lack of conscious control further marks paradox as central to Viktor Mitic's Rain Paintings. After all, his paradoxical, or one could even say, mixed constructions of approaches and influences show him to be an optimistic experimenter in an age when experimentation by way of further exploring linear art historic paths has arguably been exhausted. Certainly, process art has independently evolved to where process art’s materials are too often chosen to compete for attention via outrageousness and controversy – from making drawings with snail trails or painting with elephant dung. High abstraction, already carried to its formal apogee a half-century ago in Ad Reinhardt's era, remains in a perpetual fin de siècle where deconstructed abstract painting repeatedly, hence predictably, announces the death of Modernism. Buoying such art world cynicism is a glut of cheerfully content-free decorative abstraction. Embraced by suburban galleries and the novice collectors they depend upon, such utterly bad Modernist painting certainly supports Clement Greenberg's late Depression-era thesis advanced in his touchstone Avant-Garde and Kitsch essay: that avant-garde movements with time peter down to kitsch. Mitic, adapting post-modern approaches of juxtaposition, incompatibility and fragmentation to produce new painting, thankfully remixes 20th century art to circumvent and surpass moribund unilateral art movements.

RAIN DANCE 9

Ask Google – the fount of all info – what painting is and you'll receive a good, sound, bedrock answer: “Painting is a term applied to the deliberate application of paint to a surface, whether for decoration and protection of that surface, or in order to create an image upon that surface.”

Ask the Google-oracle, the Internet Sphinx, what painting is not, and you'll still be privy to the same quick decisiveness: “Painting,” intones Google smoothly, “is not photography, film, sculpture or performance art. It also does not belong to that category of playful conceptual art that can take any banal object and claim that it is art” (imagine Google's permitting itself this increasingly impatient and deepeningly skeptical tone!).

“Painting,” notes the same anonymous authority, “is not adept at conveying a realistic image (like the photo), movement (as in film), three-dimensionality (as in sculpture) and real life action (as in theatre and performance). We are left, then, with a medium that is unrealistic in its representation, still and flat. These facts account for the development of “way out” painting forms such as Expressionism, Surrealism and Abstraction. In all of these forms the nature of paint is utilized to do what it does best. Paint can be used to express colour, emotion and a distortion of reality, and so that is what it tends to be used for.”

It's hard, is it not, to keep from smiling at this fixity, this ingenuous assurance? Still, thinking about “what paint does best” brings us close (despite the embarrassment of phrases such as 'way out' painting forms) to the meaning of a work like Viktor Mitic's Rain 2 (ref. page 62).

The painting is clearly hectic. It betrays a certain permitted, nay, welcomed, encouraged and deliberately nurtured impatience: a wild, headlong fervour that, by means of its enactment and inscription of energy for its own sake, insists on shouldering itself into a place of rest – a place of suspended or arrested animation.

How does such painterly fury succeed in becoming inspectable? Why does the Painterly Cyclonic not rebuff the viewer? In the case of #2 (which is what I am calling the work for short), the small pigmented resting-places are important in this regard. The eye clings (frantically, gratefully) to the pictorial wreckage (incidental bits of painterly flotsam and jetsam), the wreckage being, in this case, a selection of images: a few that are vaguely representational and a few that are abstracted shapes. There is a salmon-hued sun (its rays bursting out centripetally as in a child's painting); there is also a raft-like rectangle outlined in white, bearing a chromatic cargo – dabs of scarlet. Cream-water rafting.

“Painting,” writes the always useful James Elkins in his What Painting Is (New York: Routledge, 1998), “is an unspoken and largely uncognized dialogue, where paint speaks silently in masses and colours and the artist responds in moods” (p. 5). The silence of the paint and its massing and colouration – all of it presumed by Elkins to constitute a kind of non-verbal (or pre-verbal, or post-verbal?) utterance – is all well and good, I think. There's a bit of difficulty, though, about that business of the artist's responding “in moods.”

I doubt it (the mood part, I mean). Take all that taupe-coloured, putty-hued tsunami of paint that sweeps (defying all gravities) sideways across the picture. It's pretty hard – and, I think, pointless – to wax intentionalist (see “the intentionalist fallacy”) about the mood that powered that particular sideswiping of pigment. What was it? Exaltation? Exuberance? Maybe. But why couldn't it just as well have been despair? Or anger?

The putty-coloured tempest of thin, dribbly pigment that rains across the painting – and, yes, Mitic says he frequently uses rain as a medium, fearlessly letting it wet down his pictures as one of a series of his recourses to extra-aesthetic ways of toughening and invigorating a work – is, I think, a painterly event or procedure (or deliberate allowance) preliminary to the artist's “mood.” His “mood” probably came after the precipitous act (or precipitation) of the horizontal downpour.

It's strange about the artist's un-“natural” use, in this painting, of horizontal liquidity. If the downpour were vertical – if the whole painting were vertical – then it would take its place, as an expressive ploy, in a whole cultural history of drips in painting, intentional or otherwise. And since it is pretty clear that nobody can drip or sluice sideways, it stands to reason that Mitic did, indeed, drip vertically here.

But he was quick to subvert the almost inevitable cliché. By rotating the picture 90 degrees, Mitic transforms the commonplace act of dripping into a presentation, instead of energy floating free (it's rather as if he'd replaced chain lightning, which makes steadfastly for the ground, with sheet lightning, which illuminates the entire sky). And besides, if the picture were offered as a vertical, there is a certain amount of unwanted painterly incident that becomes (almost against the artist's wishes) suddenly available. Here, for example, a taupe-coloured “creature” (dog-like, mule-like, horse-like) can be seen (if you allow it to be) standing placidly in the middle of the picture – with ears, nostrils, black “eyes” and everything. One twist of the painting, one reorienting of it into another axial attitude, however, and the “creature” has returned to the state of pure energy out of which it was initially made. There are a lot of ways to abstract something. Twisting it into another alignment is one way.

“Paint,” writes James Elkins (speaking chemically now), “is water and stone, and,” he continues, “it is also liquid thought.” Nice phrase, “liquid thought.” What is even better, and a great deal more useful in gazing upon a Viktor Mitic work, is Elkins' suggestion that “paint is a cast made of the painter's movements, a portrait of the painter's body and thoughts” (p. 5).

Well, his body anyhow. Mitic's body is everywhere in his paintings. He tends to keep his thoughts pretty much to himself.

VIKTORMITIC:PAINTASPAINTGary Michael DaultNapanee, Ontario, August 2, 2010

RAIN DANCE 1110 PAINT AS PAINT

Ask Google – the fount of all info – what painting is and you'll receive a good, sound, bedrock answer: “Painting is a term applied to the deliberate application of paint to a surface, whether for decoration and protection of that surface, or in order to create an image upon that surface.”

Ask the Google-oracle, the Internet Sphinx, what painting is not, and you'll still be privy to the same quick decisiveness: “Painting,” intones Google smoothly, “is not photography, film, sculpture or performance art. It also does not belong to that category of playful conceptual art that can take any banal object and claim that it is art” (imagine Google's permitting itself this increasingly impatient and deepeningly skeptical tone!).

“Painting,” notes the same anonymous authority, “is not adept at conveying a realistic image (like the photo), movement (as in film), three-dimensionality (as in sculpture) and real life action (as in theatre and performance). We are left, then, with a medium that is unrealistic in its representation, still and flat. These facts account for the development of “way out” painting forms such as Expressionism, Surrealism and Abstraction. In all of these forms the nature of paint is utilized to do what it does best. Paint can be used to express colour, emotion and a distortion of reality, and so that is what it tends to be used for.”

It's hard, is it not, to keep from smiling at this fixity, this ingenuous assurance? Still, thinking about “what paint does best” brings us close (despite the embarrassment of phrases such as 'way out' painting forms) to the meaning of a work like Viktor Mitic's Rain 2 (ref. page 62).

The painting is clearly hectic. It betrays a certain permitted, nay, welcomed, encouraged and deliberately nurtured impatience: a wild, headlong fervour that, by means of its enactment and inscription of energy for its own sake, insists on shouldering itself into a place of rest – a place of suspended or arrested animation.

How does such painterly fury succeed in becoming inspectable? Why does the Painterly Cyclonic not rebuff the viewer? In the case of #2 (which is what I am calling the work for short), the small pigmented resting-places are important in this regard. The eye clings (frantically, gratefully) to the pictorial wreckage (incidental bits of painterly flotsam and jetsam), the wreckage being, in this case, a selection of images: a few that are vaguely representational and a few that are abstracted shapes. There is a salmon-hued sun (its rays bursting out centripetally as in a child's painting); there is also a raft-like rectangle outlined in white, bearing a chromatic cargo – dabs of scarlet. Cream-water rafting.

“Painting,” writes the always useful James Elkins in his What Painting Is (New York: Routledge, 1998), “is an unspoken and largely uncognized dialogue, where paint speaks silently in masses and colours and the artist responds in moods” (p. 5). The silence of the paint and its massing and colouration – all of it presumed by Elkins to constitute a kind of non-verbal (or pre-verbal, or post-verbal?) utterance – is all well and good, I think. There's a bit of difficulty, though, about that business of the artist's responding “in moods.”

I doubt it (the mood part, I mean). Take all that taupe-coloured, putty-hued tsunami of paint that sweeps (defying all gravities) sideways across the picture. It's pretty hard – and, I think, pointless – to wax intentionalist (see “the intentionalist fallacy”) about the mood that powered that particular sideswiping of pigment. What was it? Exaltation? Exuberance? Maybe. But why couldn't it just as well have been despair? Or anger?

The putty-coloured tempest of thin, dribbly pigment that rains across the painting – and, yes, Mitic says he frequently uses rain as a medium, fearlessly letting it wet down his pictures as one of a series of his recourses to extra-aesthetic ways of toughening and invigorating a work – is, I think, a painterly event or procedure (or deliberate allowance) preliminary to the artist's “mood.” His “mood” probably came after the precipitous act (or precipitation) of the horizontal downpour.

It's strange about the artist's un-“natural” use, in this painting, of horizontal liquidity. If the downpour were vertical – if the whole painting were vertical – then it would take its place, as an expressive ploy, in a whole cultural history of drips in painting, intentional or otherwise. And since it is pretty clear that nobody can drip or sluice sideways, it stands to reason that Mitic did, indeed, drip vertically here.

But he was quick to subvert the almost inevitable cliché. By rotating the picture 90 degrees, Mitic transforms the commonplace act of dripping into a presentation, instead of energy floating free (it's rather as if he'd replaced chain lightning, which makes steadfastly for the ground, with sheet lightning, which illuminates the entire sky). And besides, if the picture were offered as a vertical, there is a certain amount of unwanted painterly incident that becomes (almost against the artist's wishes) suddenly available. Here, for example, a taupe-coloured “creature” (dog-like, mule-like, horse-like) can be seen (if you allow it to be) standing placidly in the middle of the picture – with ears, nostrils, black “eyes” and everything. One twist of the painting, one reorienting of it into another axial attitude, however, and the “creature” has returned to the state of pure energy out of which it was initially made. There are a lot of ways to abstract something. Twisting it into another alignment is one way.

“Paint,” writes James Elkins (speaking chemically now), “is water and stone, and,” he continues, “it is also liquid thought.” Nice phrase, “liquid thought.” What is even better, and a great deal more useful in gazing upon a Viktor Mitic work, is Elkins' suggestion that “paint is a cast made of the painter's movements, a portrait of the painter's body and thoughts” (p. 5).

Well, his body anyhow. Mitic's body is everywhere in his paintings. He tends to keep his thoughts pretty much to himself.

VIKTORMITIC:PAINTASPAINTGary Michael DaultNapanee, Ontario, August 2, 2010

RAIN DANCE 1110 PAINT AS PAINT

Gary Michael DaultFebruary 24, 2009

meditative inspection. In paintings such as R37, these detachable bladder-like things seem on their way to becoming the vegetable/mineral growth of reef-like excrescences (the picture's green “colony” appears to support orange “growths” which seem like the ripened or matured moments of the green matrix), the whole tableau floating in an indeterminate but compellingly undersea space. Undersea space or outer space or the sub-molecular space of the electron microscope.

Mitic's paintings are abstract paintings. But abstraction is a relative term. It is important, perhaps, to ask what his paintings have been abstracted from? There is no definitive or satisfactory answer securable just from looking at them – and looking at them is certainly its own reward – but I think it is safe to say that Mitic walks a line bounded by two worlds: one is a world that thrives on the artist's delicate and yet vigorous importing of nature into the realm of his works; the other is a world that supports the incorporating of certain extra-art procedures into the making of the paintings (the falling water, the plastic dermatology), in an attempt to crank up their already exotic atmospheres and set them at some considerable remove from aesthetic tact. His pictures look like something you've seen before somewhere and, simultaneously, something you've never seen before.

There's a surprising inner story to the recent paintings of Viktor Mitic, and especially to those made for a show he had in Tokyo in 2007 at the Muramatsu Gallery. Or, if it's not precisely an “inner story,” it's an example, for me anyhow, of the under-workings, in the paintings, of what might be called the Procedural Uncanny. As Mitic explained in a recent email to me: “All these paintings were done in Toronto…under weird conditions: I had to wait for a rain or storm to get these done,” he wrote. “Most of the textures you see are created by water droplets smashing into the surface of freshly painted oils on canvas. Yes, I could have done this with a water hose from my second floor,” he continues, “but it had to be genuine, and I bet the acid rain did its part in separating oil from pigment.”

I bet it did. The fact is, though, that his drenching the pictures with falling water is one way – one highly theatrical way – of distancing himself from any act of painting carried on in the conventional manner. Because this elevated, hydraulic anti-fountain of Mitic's proceeded at some remove from the normally intimate, painter/canvas dialogue – which invariably consists of a thousand small decisions made moment by moment, indeed with an almost pre-conscious rapidity – his drenching practice locates his painting method close to the realms of automatism: it posits and permits the introduction into his art of essentially unpredictable effects,

effects which, while they may be generally supposed to provide a certain forced and unfailing abstraction of the marks and painted areas that normally fill the surfaces of his paintings, also set up a strange internal meteorological turmoil in the pictures that Mitic himself is the first to be surprised by (our own reconstruction of the effects of the willed-water procedure coming much later).

In this regard, in his planning of the unpredictable, Mitic deliberately aligns himself with artists such as the surrealist Max Ernst. An example being Ernst's decision to use frottage (rubbing a pencil, say, across a rough surface and allowing the resulting marks to swarm into new, unlooked-for meanings). “When I looked closely at the drawings thus obtained [i.e. from the frottage technique],” Ernst had noted, “I was overcome by the sudden intensification of my visionary faculties.” As he once put it, “Frottage…is a means of ridding oneself of one's blindness.”

So is falling water. And so, in addition, is the transportation of a painted passage from one painting to another – as in the painting labeled R37 (ref. page 107). This chromatically saturated work, which offers the viewer a dazzlingly sub-aqueous, coral-reef-like visual experience, features what Mitic tells me, “...is a kind of skin graft, a patch of paint from another piece that I carefully removed when it was dry, and

grafted it into the new painting.” The donor, he hastens to explain, “was discarded.”

Apparently nothing at all was discarded in Mitic's two gigantically inclusive paintings, Translucent 1 and Translucent 2 (ref. page 46), each of them measuring eight by sixteen feet (and each also “done under water”). These strange paintings, epic in size and, in a sense, in inclusiveness, seem as long as landscape, as drawn-out as scrolls – with a lot to impart. The rhythmically faceted, chunky, window-like perforations that punctuate their lengths give rise to ideas about society, about history and habitation, about a long view of the rise and fall of cultures.

The smaller paintings, by contrast, seem more momentary, more transient, more like attempts by the artist to pin down and present great complexity (possibly on a biological scale) in short bursts of colouristic and morphological intensity. In paintings like R34 (ref. page 98) and R35 (ref. page 105), for example, the horizontal, lateral spread of the two Translucent works has now become a vibrantly “vertical” window on a kind of intimate, undersea, aquarium world, where bladder-like entities (like the astonishing blue-white blob in R34, with its wispy, whitish antenna or stem, or the mysterious green-bronzed, balloon-like protagonist of R35) float in a magma of supportive colour that compels close and

(ref. page 22)

RAIN DANCE:RECENT PAINTINGS BY VIKTOR MITIC

RAIN DANCE 1312 RAIN DANCE

Gary Michael DaultFebruary 24, 2009

meditative inspection. In paintings such as R37, these detachable bladder-like things seem on their way to becoming the vegetable/mineral growth of reef-like excrescences (the picture's green “colony” appears to support orange “growths” which seem like the ripened or matured moments of the green matrix), the whole tableau floating in an indeterminate but compellingly undersea space. Undersea space or outer space or the sub-molecular space of the electron microscope.

Mitic's paintings are abstract paintings. But abstraction is a relative term. It is important, perhaps, to ask what his paintings have been abstracted from? There is no definitive or satisfactory answer securable just from looking at them – and looking at them is certainly its own reward – but I think it is safe to say that Mitic walks a line bounded by two worlds: one is a world that thrives on the artist's delicate and yet vigorous importing of nature into the realm of his works; the other is a world that supports the incorporating of certain extra-art procedures into the making of the paintings (the falling water, the plastic dermatology), in an attempt to crank up their already exotic atmospheres and set them at some considerable remove from aesthetic tact. His pictures look like something you've seen before somewhere and, simultaneously, something you've never seen before.

There's a surprising inner story to the recent paintings of Viktor Mitic, and especially to those made for a show he had in Tokyo in 2007 at the Muramatsu Gallery. Or, if it's not precisely an “inner story,” it's an example, for me anyhow, of the under-workings, in the paintings, of what might be called the Procedural Uncanny. As Mitic explained in a recent email to me: “All these paintings were done in Toronto…under weird conditions: I had to wait for a rain or storm to get these done,” he wrote. “Most of the textures you see are created by water droplets smashing into the surface of freshly painted oils on canvas. Yes, I could have done this with a water hose from my second floor,” he continues, “but it had to be genuine, and I bet the acid rain did its part in separating oil from pigment.”

I bet it did. The fact is, though, that his drenching the pictures with falling water is one way – one highly theatrical way – of distancing himself from any act of painting carried on in the conventional manner. Because this elevated, hydraulic anti-fountain of Mitic's proceeded at some remove from the normally intimate, painter/canvas dialogue – which invariably consists of a thousand small decisions made moment by moment, indeed with an almost pre-conscious rapidity – his drenching practice locates his painting method close to the realms of automatism: it posits and permits the introduction into his art of essentially unpredictable effects,

effects which, while they may be generally supposed to provide a certain forced and unfailing abstraction of the marks and painted areas that normally fill the surfaces of his paintings, also set up a strange internal meteorological turmoil in the pictures that Mitic himself is the first to be surprised by (our own reconstruction of the effects of the willed-water procedure coming much later).

In this regard, in his planning of the unpredictable, Mitic deliberately aligns himself with artists such as the surrealist Max Ernst. An example being Ernst's decision to use frottage (rubbing a pencil, say, across a rough surface and allowing the resulting marks to swarm into new, unlooked-for meanings). “When I looked closely at the drawings thus obtained [i.e. from the frottage technique],” Ernst had noted, “I was overcome by the sudden intensification of my visionary faculties.” As he once put it, “Frottage…is a means of ridding oneself of one's blindness.”

So is falling water. And so, in addition, is the transportation of a painted passage from one painting to another – as in the painting labeled R37 (ref. page 107). This chromatically saturated work, which offers the viewer a dazzlingly sub-aqueous, coral-reef-like visual experience, features what Mitic tells me, “...is a kind of skin graft, a patch of paint from another piece that I carefully removed when it was dry, and

grafted it into the new painting.” The donor, he hastens to explain, “was discarded.”

Apparently nothing at all was discarded in Mitic's two gigantically inclusive paintings, Translucent 1 and Translucent 2 (ref. page 46), each of them measuring eight by sixteen feet (and each also “done under water”). These strange paintings, epic in size and, in a sense, in inclusiveness, seem as long as landscape, as drawn-out as scrolls – with a lot to impart. The rhythmically faceted, chunky, window-like perforations that punctuate their lengths give rise to ideas about society, about history and habitation, about a long view of the rise and fall of cultures.

The smaller paintings, by contrast, seem more momentary, more transient, more like attempts by the artist to pin down and present great complexity (possibly on a biological scale) in short bursts of colouristic and morphological intensity. In paintings like R34 (ref. page 98) and R35 (ref. page 105), for example, the horizontal, lateral spread of the two Translucent works has now become a vibrantly “vertical” window on a kind of intimate, undersea, aquarium world, where bladder-like entities (like the astonishing blue-white blob in R34, with its wispy, whitish antenna or stem, or the mysterious green-bronzed, balloon-like protagonist of R35) float in a magma of supportive colour that compels close and

(ref. page 22)

RAIN DANCE:RECENT PAINTINGS BY VIKTOR MITIC

RAIN DANCE 1312 RAIN DANCE

Gary Michael DaultToronto, June 10, 2007

If you look deeply enough into Viktor Mitic's hectic new paintings, which seem always to be in the throes of being born from the canvases upon which he builds them, you will perhaps be able to see all the way back through time to the days of a rigorous, professional art training he once received in his native Serbia.

Regardless of how tumultuous his paintings now appear to be – and they appear to be very tumultuous indeed – there is, nevertheless, always a sense of order at their core, an innate, residual feeling for balance, proportion, a morphological tact that always provides (whatever pictorial madness seems to be afoot) for the up-ness and down-ness of things, for the push-pull of spaces located both near to the painting's surface and deep within it, for the enactments of narrative, for the right rhythms, that let you feel the disposition of incidents on a plane and the spatial appropriateness of the varieties of their playing-out.

All this, I would venture, is the fruit of the impress of the academy, the whisperings of a memory that prompts for the right way to do things. And all this, Viktor Mitic is in the throes of forgetting.

And so I would say that the paintings you see being born before you are, in a sense, being reborn before you. And

that's what I like most about Mitic's work: his acceptance, on the one hand (what choice is there?) of the tropes of academicism (horizon lines, vertical stripes as trees, as fences, as backgrounds, the roundness of suns and planets and other highly charged ciphers, the subliminal face, the floating moon, the phallus in the underbrush) and, on the other hand, his intense struggle to jettison everything he has learned and – painting in the open sun in the atrium behind his studio on Queen Street in Toronto – painting himself into paroxysms of strained and willful invention.

I like Mitic at his most convulsive. I like the picture #343 (ref. page 117) in which a chord of verticals at the far left (they look like stalks of bamboo) are pretty much the only image there is to hold on to (except for a few buoyant, rising-bubble circles) while the rest of the painting (nets of pink) is pushed to the brink of dissolution. And I like the one where biomorphic shapes in cream, surrounded by a curious, putty-coloured grey, strive up from the bottom of the painting to confront an awaiting gathering of green and of turquoise shapes which themselves float (though further back) against a deep and distant ground. These paintings, for all of Mitic's procedural inventions, are still landscapes – and, I would venture, a genuine contribution to the simultaneous retention of and extension of the landscape mode in painting.

And I want to add a word at this point about Mitic's colour. Mostly, it's a deliberately offhand colour, much given to hospital-corridor greens and front-porch greys, subway-station creams, medicinal violets and bedroomy pinks and flesh-tones. It possesses a new-world beauty, the beauty of chromatic everyday-ness which, when taken from the larger banalities of its usual existence, shines on Mitic's canvases with a brand new privileging.

And there's that big painting I want to say something about – the huge dun-coloured horizontal with the blue airborne events animating its upper half. When I first saw this prodigious painting, I thought there wasn't enough going on in it – that its painterly incidents were too meager to sustain the space on which they were positioned. I now think, by contrast, that the picture is heavily loaded. It's amusing to realize that, however pigment-embroiled its techniques and procedures (dripping, flinging, masking-out), the painting remains a landscape – a fresh and compelling one, its lower half given over to “vegetative” preoccupations on Mitic's part (a dripping of “mountains” or of “forest”), with its upper half (which curls down to the bottom at the right) open to the free movement of those heaving, billowing, leaping pale-bluish objects outlined in white or darker blue – heaving themselves through Mitic's painted matrix like dolphins in the sea.

VIKTORMITIC: GOINGAROUNDAND COMINGAROUND

RAIN DANCE 1514 GOING AROUND AND COMING AROUND

Gary Michael DaultToronto, June 10, 2007

If you look deeply enough into Viktor Mitic's hectic new paintings, which seem always to be in the throes of being born from the canvases upon which he builds them, you will perhaps be able to see all the way back through time to the days of a rigorous, professional art training he once received in his native Serbia.

Regardless of how tumultuous his paintings now appear to be – and they appear to be very tumultuous indeed – there is, nevertheless, always a sense of order at their core, an innate, residual feeling for balance, proportion, a morphological tact that always provides (whatever pictorial madness seems to be afoot) for the up-ness and down-ness of things, for the push-pull of spaces located both near to the painting's surface and deep within it, for the enactments of narrative, for the right rhythms, that let you feel the disposition of incidents on a plane and the spatial appropriateness of the varieties of their playing-out.

All this, I would venture, is the fruit of the impress of the academy, the whisperings of a memory that prompts for the right way to do things. And all this, Viktor Mitic is in the throes of forgetting.

And so I would say that the paintings you see being born before you are, in a sense, being reborn before you. And

that's what I like most about Mitic's work: his acceptance, on the one hand (what choice is there?) of the tropes of academicism (horizon lines, vertical stripes as trees, as fences, as backgrounds, the roundness of suns and planets and other highly charged ciphers, the subliminal face, the floating moon, the phallus in the underbrush) and, on the other hand, his intense struggle to jettison everything he has learned and – painting in the open sun in the atrium behind his studio on Queen Street in Toronto – painting himself into paroxysms of strained and willful invention.

I like Mitic at his most convulsive. I like the picture #343 (ref. page 117) in which a chord of verticals at the far left (they look like stalks of bamboo) are pretty much the only image there is to hold on to (except for a few buoyant, rising-bubble circles) while the rest of the painting (nets of pink) is pushed to the brink of dissolution. And I like the one where biomorphic shapes in cream, surrounded by a curious, putty-coloured grey, strive up from the bottom of the painting to confront an awaiting gathering of green and of turquoise shapes which themselves float (though further back) against a deep and distant ground. These paintings, for all of Mitic's procedural inventions, are still landscapes – and, I would venture, a genuine contribution to the simultaneous retention of and extension of the landscape mode in painting.

And I want to add a word at this point about Mitic's colour. Mostly, it's a deliberately offhand colour, much given to hospital-corridor greens and front-porch greys, subway-station creams, medicinal violets and bedroomy pinks and flesh-tones. It possesses a new-world beauty, the beauty of chromatic everyday-ness which, when taken from the larger banalities of its usual existence, shines on Mitic's canvases with a brand new privileging.

And there's that big painting I want to say something about – the huge dun-coloured horizontal with the blue airborne events animating its upper half. When I first saw this prodigious painting, I thought there wasn't enough going on in it – that its painterly incidents were too meager to sustain the space on which they were positioned. I now think, by contrast, that the picture is heavily loaded. It's amusing to realize that, however pigment-embroiled its techniques and procedures (dripping, flinging, masking-out), the painting remains a landscape – a fresh and compelling one, its lower half given over to “vegetative” preoccupations on Mitic's part (a dripping of “mountains” or of “forest”), with its upper half (which curls down to the bottom at the right) open to the free movement of those heaving, billowing, leaping pale-bluish objects outlined in white or darker blue – heaving themselves through Mitic's painted matrix like dolphins in the sea.

VIKTORMITIC: GOINGAROUNDAND COMINGAROUND

RAIN DANCE 1514 GOING AROUND AND COMING AROUND

Ewan Whyte

COLOURED DREAMS, VISUAL MUSIC: THE RAIN PAINTINGS OF VIKTOR MITIC

The Rain Paintings of Viktor Mitic are a kind of “aleatory art” in which natural rain is the constant companion of the artist as he creates mostly non-figurative pieces. He achieves remarkable results when he is working outside with his canvases on the ground under the random presence of natural rain, thunderstorms and even hail during his painting processes. It is as if several senses are at work, creating startling and calming effects from this inspired method. There are feelings of an almost lunar calm together with the muted immanence of solar violence in the segregated warmer colours in many of these paintings. This is an intense inner mythic-like world he has constructed that complements and includes nature. Here he paints with a sense of consumed intensity where even acid rain, like smog sunsets, can add to the final work. The more than sixty paintings cover a large range of emotional landscapes. Bright reds and oranges are swallowed by colder blues, greys and greens. Shapes are distilled to masses of dense forms in larger diaphanous washes of colder and sometimes warmer areas of surrounding chromatic space.

There is a strong suggestion of synaesthesia with sound and colour in these paintings, as if a visual music present in their composition lifts them to a multisensory expression. Hearing colour is an old idea. It has been described by many artists in the twentieth century, most famously by the so-called

father of abstract painting, Wassily Kandinsky. He discovered his synaesthesia while attending Wagner's opera Lohengrin in Moscow. He said, “I saw all my colours in spirit, before my eyes. Wild almost crazy lines were sketched in front of me.” In his 1911 publication entitled Concerning the Spiritual in Art, he wrote, “When [blue] sinks almost to black, it echoes a grief that is hardly human. When it rises towards white...its appeal to humans grows weaker and more distant.” Another artist affected by synaesthesia was the twentieth century composer Olivier Messiaen. He wrote, “When I hear music, I see in the mind's eye colours which move with the music. This is not imagination, nor is it a psychic phenomenon. It is an inward reality.”

Earlier, Plato famously wrote about harmony and tone in relation to art, though synaesthesia as we understand it was first described by the philosopher John Locke in 1690. He mentioned “a studious blind man” who claimed to see scarlet when he would hear certain sounds of a trumpet. This now well-known phenomenon was a matter of much conjecture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and only recently have neuroscientists been able to prove the idea of “seeing sound.” How much of the population can do this is uncertain. It may be that we all can unconsciously relate to colour in some way our waking minds have no knowledge of.

Whatever the case may eventually prove to be, these Rain Paintings of Viktor Mitic have an immediate effect that seems to reach far more than one sense alone. They are immediately engrossing, and the imagination of the viewer is pulled in to wander in these inner landscapes he has created.

For example, there is a lunar landscape feel to the abstract painting Constellation, Blue (ref. page 48). Its slate blue colours and muted cold and opposing reds are covered over with transparent washes of blues which soften the warmth of the reds to make them a complementing cold. One corner of the rounded red diamond shape which has the appearance of a covered autumn leaf is showing through its cool red a small warm patch of red. This lifts our eyes for a moment to the top of the painting using the entire vertical space and creating considerable movement. To the lower right of this is a weaker red rectangular shape in front of four subtle greenish-hued paint strokes. One of these, which resembles the red shape above the line separating the shapes below, comprises the whole spectrum of all the colours in the painting. An almost human face or mask is discernible as if it were in a cloud just above the line cut off, creating a numinous presence. The surface of the painting is a rough evenly-pocked canvas skin.

Much aleatory art has been created in attempts to separate itself from mimicking nature (in terms of representing its objects and its patterns). This fictive impulse is old. Leonardo da Vinci even complained about it in his time. He wrote that “those who practice art without order are as those who fully knowing get on a ship without a rudder and set sail.” In the twentieth century, there was a flourishing of attempts at entirely random art. The culminations of this were perhaps the artists who got monkeys to run across canvases with paint on them. Viktor Mitic's Rain Paintings are entirely the opposite in spirit, though he does employ random elements while attending to colour theory and aesthetic design.

There is a controlled order to the ways in which rain affects these canvases. It is an ordered chaos far from da Vinci's complaint. There is an ordered sense to the way Viktor Mitic consciously uses rain to give the colours a consistent interrelation of part to part and as a whole in their coldness and warmth. He also uses it with shades of white in unexpected lightening of washes. The lightest in colour of these when manipulated by rain suggests diaphanous craters of white. In the centre of the city of Toronto there are days acid rain can affect the colours, giving them stronger reactions to each other which are very different from the effects Mitic gets from similar rain conditions in more rural

areas. The use of reds, blues and greens has an almost otherworldly feel, as if they were images relayed from a faraway planet.

The result of rain as it is incorporated in this series of paintings gives an aesthetic tone similar to the emotional state of being when we are around natural rain, in the sense that the feeling of the inner introspective concentration associated with rain is apparent. That this inner feeling is expressed outwardly on these canvases is interesting as well as pleasing. It is this world of two things that (Umberto Eco claims) we inhabit when we are contemplating art. We work through an inner landscape while interacting with art and ourselves at the same time that we are half conscious at the altar of art. This is the usual state of affairs for our imaginations, and Mitic addresses this dichotomy with timely intuition.

Viktor Mitic is relentless in experimenting with new ways of approaching and creating art. He is classically western in his restless search for something new. New expressions, new ways of looking at iconic and traditional images are coupled with new ways of painting and looking at the creative process. He goes past taboos with his use of religious iconography and current sacred images. The ubiquitous presence of guns he turns into tools for creating art in his

bullet paintings. And now the life-giving essence of rain is celebrated in paint. Not just as in the past in so many paintings of raining landscapes, but rain landscapes themselves. These paintings have the quality of being viewed with a kind of pleasing intensity as if waking from moments of imagination (in front of them) to find we were dreaming.

Mitic is an artist who is well-rounded. He is an excellent draftsman. He has a remarkable sense of design and has a subtle sensitivity to colour and its theory. Wassily Kandinsky, describing what an artist should bring to the creation of abstract art, wrote:

Of all the arts, abstract painting is the most difficult. It demands that you know how to draw well, that you have a heightened sensitivity for composition and for colors, and that you be a true poet. This last is essential.

Viktor Mitic has these qualities, and implies that he brings to his Rain Paintings aesthetic mirrors of painted dreams when he says: “Sometimes paintings paint themselves.”

RAIN DANCE 1716 COLOURED DREAMS, VISUAL MUSIC

Ewan Whyte

COLOURED DREAMS, VISUAL MUSIC: THE RAIN PAINTINGS OF VIKTOR MITIC

The Rain Paintings of Viktor Mitic are a kind of “aleatory art” in which natural rain is the constant companion of the artist as he creates mostly non-figurative pieces. He achieves remarkable results when he is working outside with his canvases on the ground under the random presence of natural rain, thunderstorms and even hail during his painting processes. It is as if several senses are at work, creating startling and calming effects from this inspired method. There are feelings of an almost lunar calm together with the muted immanence of solar violence in the segregated warmer colours in many of these paintings. This is an intense inner mythic-like world he has constructed that complements and includes nature. Here he paints with a sense of consumed intensity where even acid rain, like smog sunsets, can add to the final work. The more than sixty paintings cover a large range of emotional landscapes. Bright reds and oranges are swallowed by colder blues, greys and greens. Shapes are distilled to masses of dense forms in larger diaphanous washes of colder and sometimes warmer areas of surrounding chromatic space.

There is a strong suggestion of synaesthesia with sound and colour in these paintings, as if a visual music present in their composition lifts them to a multisensory expression. Hearing colour is an old idea. It has been described by many artists in the twentieth century, most famously by the so-called

father of abstract painting, Wassily Kandinsky. He discovered his synaesthesia while attending Wagner's opera Lohengrin in Moscow. He said, “I saw all my colours in spirit, before my eyes. Wild almost crazy lines were sketched in front of me.” In his 1911 publication entitled Concerning the Spiritual in Art, he wrote, “When [blue] sinks almost to black, it echoes a grief that is hardly human. When it rises towards white...its appeal to humans grows weaker and more distant.” Another artist affected by synaesthesia was the twentieth century composer Olivier Messiaen. He wrote, “When I hear music, I see in the mind's eye colours which move with the music. This is not imagination, nor is it a psychic phenomenon. It is an inward reality.”

Earlier, Plato famously wrote about harmony and tone in relation to art, though synaesthesia as we understand it was first described by the philosopher John Locke in 1690. He mentioned “a studious blind man” who claimed to see scarlet when he would hear certain sounds of a trumpet. This now well-known phenomenon was a matter of much conjecture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and only recently have neuroscientists been able to prove the idea of “seeing sound.” How much of the population can do this is uncertain. It may be that we all can unconsciously relate to colour in some way our waking minds have no knowledge of.

Whatever the case may eventually prove to be, these Rain Paintings of Viktor Mitic have an immediate effect that seems to reach far more than one sense alone. They are immediately engrossing, and the imagination of the viewer is pulled in to wander in these inner landscapes he has created.

For example, there is a lunar landscape feel to the abstract painting Constellation, Blue (ref. page 48). Its slate blue colours and muted cold and opposing reds are covered over with transparent washes of blues which soften the warmth of the reds to make them a complementing cold. One corner of the rounded red diamond shape which has the appearance of a covered autumn leaf is showing through its cool red a small warm patch of red. This lifts our eyes for a moment to the top of the painting using the entire vertical space and creating considerable movement. To the lower right of this is a weaker red rectangular shape in front of four subtle greenish-hued paint strokes. One of these, which resembles the red shape above the line separating the shapes below, comprises the whole spectrum of all the colours in the painting. An almost human face or mask is discernible as if it were in a cloud just above the line cut off, creating a numinous presence. The surface of the painting is a rough evenly-pocked canvas skin.

Much aleatory art has been created in attempts to separate itself from mimicking nature (in terms of representing its objects and its patterns). This fictive impulse is old. Leonardo da Vinci even complained about it in his time. He wrote that “those who practice art without order are as those who fully knowing get on a ship without a rudder and set sail.” In the twentieth century, there was a flourishing of attempts at entirely random art. The culminations of this were perhaps the artists who got monkeys to run across canvases with paint on them. Viktor Mitic's Rain Paintings are entirely the opposite in spirit, though he does employ random elements while attending to colour theory and aesthetic design.

There is a controlled order to the ways in which rain affects these canvases. It is an ordered chaos far from da Vinci's complaint. There is an ordered sense to the way Viktor Mitic consciously uses rain to give the colours a consistent interrelation of part to part and as a whole in their coldness and warmth. He also uses it with shades of white in unexpected lightening of washes. The lightest in colour of these when manipulated by rain suggests diaphanous craters of white. In the centre of the city of Toronto there are days acid rain can affect the colours, giving them stronger reactions to each other which are very different from the effects Mitic gets from similar rain conditions in more rural

areas. The use of reds, blues and greens has an almost otherworldly feel, as if they were images relayed from a faraway planet.

The result of rain as it is incorporated in this series of paintings gives an aesthetic tone similar to the emotional state of being when we are around natural rain, in the sense that the feeling of the inner introspective concentration associated with rain is apparent. That this inner feeling is expressed outwardly on these canvases is interesting as well as pleasing. It is this world of two things that (Umberto Eco claims) we inhabit when we are contemplating art. We work through an inner landscape while interacting with art and ourselves at the same time that we are half conscious at the altar of art. This is the usual state of affairs for our imaginations, and Mitic addresses this dichotomy with timely intuition.

Viktor Mitic is relentless in experimenting with new ways of approaching and creating art. He is classically western in his restless search for something new. New expressions, new ways of looking at iconic and traditional images are coupled with new ways of painting and looking at the creative process. He goes past taboos with his use of religious iconography and current sacred images. The ubiquitous presence of guns he turns into tools for creating art in his

bullet paintings. And now the life-giving essence of rain is celebrated in paint. Not just as in the past in so many paintings of raining landscapes, but rain landscapes themselves. These paintings have the quality of being viewed with a kind of pleasing intensity as if waking from moments of imagination (in front of them) to find we were dreaming.

Mitic is an artist who is well-rounded. He is an excellent draftsman. He has a remarkable sense of design and has a subtle sensitivity to colour and its theory. Wassily Kandinsky, describing what an artist should bring to the creation of abstract art, wrote:

Of all the arts, abstract painting is the most difficult. It demands that you know how to draw well, that you have a heightened sensitivity for composition and for colors, and that you be a true poet. This last is essential.

Viktor Mitic has these qualities, and implies that he brings to his Rain Paintings aesthetic mirrors of painted dreams when he says: “Sometimes paintings paint themselves.”

RAIN DANCE 1716 COLOURED DREAMS, VISUAL MUSIC

Cole Swanson, 2010

But not all of Mitic's paintings appear like this. In fact, pieces such as White Rain, Angular Shapes (ref. page 109) exude a commanding sense of organization. He covers large areas of the painting in opaque whites, carefully marking the contours of window-like shapes where the chaos of the rain is contained. Paul-Émile Borduas, the founder of Quebec's Les Automatistes, made several pieces that have similar compositions. While Borduas was inspired by the Surrealists and also drew from his subconscious while he painted, his works differ in their limited tonal palette. It is particularly interesting that within this single collection lie stark reminiscences of past artists. Could this suggest that influences from a collective unconscious are among the multiple forces at work when the artist paints?

Viktor Mitic's multifold approach draws from an array of conscious and unconscious influences. The deliberate process of creating work, subjecting it to bad weather, and resolving the damage is a contrast to Mitic's drift toward automatism. His use of an environmental catalyst – in this case, the rain – expresses a desire to temporarily abandon his responsibilities. In doing so, the canvases include passages that express moments of entropy that only external, unpredictable forces could produce. The resulting collection looks beyond the inner workings of a single person to a more universal space that has the capacity to both calm and disrupt its viewers. From the confines of Mitic's canvases emerge a miasma of colour and form, revealing an arena for free-association and visceral understanding.

RAIN DANCE 1918 RAIN DANCE

There are disparate forces at play that naturally syncopate when a painter creates new work. Whether it be an intuitive or conscious creative approach that is undertaken, it can be argued that elements of both are often evident. Perhaps this is a reflection of the simple process of pondering, wherein the construction and deconstruction of a constant stream of possibilities is charged and informed by our aptitudes for reasoning and imagining. Not surprisingly, there is a broad spectrum of conscious and unconscious practices on which painterly processes fall: on one end are the Conceptualists, and the other the Surrealist Automatists. With the exception of these two poles, however, clean-cut divisions are seldom. As much as a painting can depict a struggle of brushstrokes, it can also convey a mêlée of desires and motivations. Some of these are deliberately channeled and plotted onto the canvas, while others go undetected, only to bubble up from the unconscious.

As Viktor Mitic struggled through the completion of a series of non-representational paintings, serendipity intervened: A rolling storm rained down upon his unfinished works, branding each piece with an array of peculiar yet pleasing markings. Hose in hand, Mitic quickly realized that he was unable to recreate the perfectly improvised effect of natural rain in his artwork and decided – quite consciously, of course – that he would have to wait until the weather dictated his return to the studio.

Before exposing his paintings to the rain, Mitic produced many pieces that were, in their own right, developed. His trepidation about declaring them finished works is what

makes this process particularly interesting. In most cases, an artist claims sole responsibility for a piece upon its completion. Even if the paintings were intuitively composed, which in this case they were, every mark made would be unequivocally claimed by the artist. In light of Mitic's unease with the state of his pieces, the storm offered a much needed diversion. The rain-washed works were not only visually more dimensional, but they appeared to be the product of a purposeful collaboration.

The exhibition's title, Rain Dance, seems fitting considering the obvious primitive sensibility of Mitic's approach: Dressed in makeshift ceremonial garb (in this case, a shiny plastic rain cloak), he offers his paintings to the forces of nature to reap the blessings of the rain. The imagery conveyed is no doubt amusing, but this almost religious form of escapism – the act of placing a burden onto a higher power – has certainly been a popular form of refuge throughout the ages. Whether or not Mitic views the rain as divine intervention, his work, near cosmic in appearance, is sure to resonate with viewers on a metaphysical plane. Perhaps this is because from Palaeolithic times until only very recently, artwork has been regarded as a channel between worlds and a means of paying homage to some form of god.

Mitic does not stop there, however. As the water disturbs layers of oil, even boring fissures into the acrylic under-painting, he takes up his brush again, reacting quickly and intuitively to salvage successful areas of the canvas while adding refinements to the parts being demolished by the

storm. He exercises control once more as he pulls the piece toward finality. The “dance,” as Mitic puts it, is less of an enlightening religious experience, and more of a determined struggle. Indeed, Mitic discarded several unsuccessful pieces produced through this process, suggesting that the marriage between artist and tempest is not always a happy one.

There are countless differences among the paintings in the Rain Dance series. An obvious explanation for this is that the artist works automatically, applying paint without rationale. But a closer look reveals some trends throughout the works; many pieces are composed in an organic, ethereal way, and others are geometrically divided between positive and negative space.

The first group of pieces is reminiscent of paintings by the French Symbolist Odilon Redon, whose ambiguous compositions share a strikingly similar palette. In many of Redon's works, soft pastel colour fields segue into moments of saturated vermillion and turquoise. While Mitic's paintings share some of these chromatic trends, his works also exhibit an uncanny compositional similarity. In fact, when comparing Redon's Roger and Angelica (1912) and Mitic's R28 (ref. page 106), one cannot help but notice that they are practically inverse images. What does this say about the Rain Dance series? Is it purely coincidental that both artists, separated by almost a century, share a common aesthetic pulse?

VIKTORMITIC: RAINDANCE

Cole Swanson, 2010

But not all of Mitic's paintings appear like this. In fact, pieces such as White Rain, Angular Shapes (ref. page 109) exude a commanding sense of organization. He covers large areas of the painting in opaque whites, carefully marking the contours of window-like shapes where the chaos of the rain is contained. Paul-Émile Borduas, the founder of Quebec's Les Automatistes, made several pieces that have similar compositions. While Borduas was inspired by the Surrealists and also drew from his subconscious while he painted, his works differ in their limited tonal palette. It is particularly interesting that within this single collection lie stark reminiscences of past artists. Could this suggest that influences from a collective unconscious are among the multiple forces at work when the artist paints?

Viktor Mitic's multifold approach draws from an array of conscious and unconscious influences. The deliberate process of creating work, subjecting it to bad weather, and resolving the damage is a contrast to Mitic's drift toward automatism. His use of an environmental catalyst – in this case, the rain – expresses a desire to temporarily abandon his responsibilities. In doing so, the canvases include passages that express moments of entropy that only external, unpredictable forces could produce. The resulting collection looks beyond the inner workings of a single person to a more universal space that has the capacity to both calm and disrupt its viewers. From the confines of Mitic's canvases emerge a miasma of colour and form, revealing an arena for free-association and visceral understanding.

RAIN DANCE 1918 RAIN DANCE

There are disparate forces at play that naturally syncopate when a painter creates new work. Whether it be an intuitive or conscious creative approach that is undertaken, it can be argued that elements of both are often evident. Perhaps this is a reflection of the simple process of pondering, wherein the construction and deconstruction of a constant stream of possibilities is charged and informed by our aptitudes for reasoning and imagining. Not surprisingly, there is a broad spectrum of conscious and unconscious practices on which painterly processes fall: on one end are the Conceptualists, and the other the Surrealist Automatists. With the exception of these two poles, however, clean-cut divisions are seldom. As much as a painting can depict a struggle of brushstrokes, it can also convey a mêlée of desires and motivations. Some of these are deliberately channeled and plotted onto the canvas, while others go undetected, only to bubble up from the unconscious.

As Viktor Mitic struggled through the completion of a series of non-representational paintings, serendipity intervened: A rolling storm rained down upon his unfinished works, branding each piece with an array of peculiar yet pleasing markings. Hose in hand, Mitic quickly realized that he was unable to recreate the perfectly improvised effect of natural rain in his artwork and decided – quite consciously, of course – that he would have to wait until the weather dictated his return to the studio.

Before exposing his paintings to the rain, Mitic produced many pieces that were, in their own right, developed. His trepidation about declaring them finished works is what

makes this process particularly interesting. In most cases, an artist claims sole responsibility for a piece upon its completion. Even if the paintings were intuitively composed, which in this case they were, every mark made would be unequivocally claimed by the artist. In light of Mitic's unease with the state of his pieces, the storm offered a much needed diversion. The rain-washed works were not only visually more dimensional, but they appeared to be the product of a purposeful collaboration.

The exhibition's title, Rain Dance, seems fitting considering the obvious primitive sensibility of Mitic's approach: Dressed in makeshift ceremonial garb (in this case, a shiny plastic rain cloak), he offers his paintings to the forces of nature to reap the blessings of the rain. The imagery conveyed is no doubt amusing, but this almost religious form of escapism – the act of placing a burden onto a higher power – has certainly been a popular form of refuge throughout the ages. Whether or not Mitic views the rain as divine intervention, his work, near cosmic in appearance, is sure to resonate with viewers on a metaphysical plane. Perhaps this is because from Palaeolithic times until only very recently, artwork has been regarded as a channel between worlds and a means of paying homage to some form of god.

Mitic does not stop there, however. As the water disturbs layers of oil, even boring fissures into the acrylic under-painting, he takes up his brush again, reacting quickly and intuitively to salvage successful areas of the canvas while adding refinements to the parts being demolished by the

storm. He exercises control once more as he pulls the piece toward finality. The “dance,” as Mitic puts it, is less of an enlightening religious experience, and more of a determined struggle. Indeed, Mitic discarded several unsuccessful pieces produced through this process, suggesting that the marriage between artist and tempest is not always a happy one.

There are countless differences among the paintings in the Rain Dance series. An obvious explanation for this is that the artist works automatically, applying paint without rationale. But a closer look reveals some trends throughout the works; many pieces are composed in an organic, ethereal way, and others are geometrically divided between positive and negative space.

The first group of pieces is reminiscent of paintings by the French Symbolist Odilon Redon, whose ambiguous compositions share a strikingly similar palette. In many of Redon's works, soft pastel colour fields segue into moments of saturated vermillion and turquoise. While Mitic's paintings share some of these chromatic trends, his works also exhibit an uncanny compositional similarity. In fact, when comparing Redon's Roger and Angelica (1912) and Mitic's R28 (ref. page 106), one cannot help but notice that they are practically inverse images. What does this say about the Rain Dance series? Is it purely coincidental that both artists, separated by almost a century, share a common aesthetic pulse?

VIKTORMITIC: RAINDANCE

TRANSLUCENT

TRANSLUCENT

Translucent 1 / 2009 / 244 x 487 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas

RAIN DANCE 2322 TRANSLUCENT

Translucent 1 / 2009 / 244 x 487 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas

RAIN DANCE 2322 TRANSLUCENT

Constellation Fragments / 2008 / 61 x 61 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas / courtesy of Takanobu and Miyako Yamamoto, Japan

Translucent 322009

58.5 x 78.8 cmacid rain, oil on canvas

RAIN DANCE 2524 TRANSLUCENT

Constellation Fragments / 2008 / 61 x 61 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas / courtesy of Takanobu and Miyako Yamamoto, Japan

Translucent 322009

58.5 x 78.8 cmacid rain, oil on canvas

RAIN DANCE 2524 TRANSLUCENT

26

Constellation Pink, Green / 2008 / 61 x 61 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas / courtesy of the estate of Hidenaga Harano, Japan

RAIN DANCE 27

Constellation Purple / 2008 / 61 x 61 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas

TRANSLUCENT

26

Constellation Pink, Green / 2008 / 61 x 61 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas / courtesy of the estate of Hidenaga Harano, Japan

RAIN DANCE 27

Constellation Purple / 2008 / 61 x 61 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas

TRANSLUCENT

28 RAIN DANCE 29

White Squares, Dots / 2009 / 244 x 487 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas

TRANSLUCENT

28 RAIN DANCE 29

White Squares, Dots / 2009 / 244 x 487 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas

TRANSLUCENT

Ocean #7 / cid rain, oil on canvas2008 / 101.6 x 160 cm / a

30 RAIN DANCE 31

Constellation Yellow Detail / 2008 / 61 x 61 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas

TRANSLUCENT

Ocean #7 / cid rain, oil on canvas2008 / 101.6 x 160 cm / a

30 RAIN DANCE 31

Constellation Yellow Detail / 2008 / 61 x 61 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas

TRANSLUCENT

Constellation Light / 2008 / 61 x 61 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas / courtesy of Takanobu and Miyako Yamamoto, Japan

32

Constellation Blue Star / 2008 / 61 x 61 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas

RAIN DANCE 33TRANSLUCENT

Constellation Light / 2008 / 61 x 61 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas / courtesy of Takanobu and Miyako Yamamoto, Japan

32

Constellation Blue Star / 2008 / 61 x 61 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas

RAIN DANCE 33TRANSLUCENT

Constellation Yellow, Pink, Red / 2008 / 61 x 61 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas Constellation Green Plasma / 2008 / 61 x 61 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas

34 RAIN DANCE 35TRANSLUCENT

Constellation Yellow, Pink, Red / 2008 / 61 x 61 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas Constellation Green Plasma / 2008 / 61 x 61 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas

34 RAIN DANCE 35TRANSLUCENT

36

Constellation Green Explosion / 2008 / 61 x 61 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas / courtesy of Mary Kancer, Canada

RAIN DANCE 37

Galaxy / 2008 / 61 x 122 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas / courtesy of Paul Balanger and Josée Bouchard, Canada

TRANSLUCENT

36

Constellation Green Explosion / 2008 / 61 x 61 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas / courtesy of Mary Kancer, Canada

RAIN DANCE 37

Galaxy / 2008 / 61 x 122 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas / courtesy of Paul Balanger and Josée Bouchard, Canada

TRANSLUCENT

Constellation Gray, Red Fire / 2008 / 61 x 61 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas

38

Constellation Pale / 2008 / 61 x 61 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas

RAIN DANCE 39TRANSLUCENT

Constellation Gray, Red Fire / 2008 / 61 x 61 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas

38

Constellation Pale / 2008 / 61 x 61 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas

RAIN DANCE 39TRANSLUCENT

Red Star / 2008 / 61 x 61 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas

RAIN DANCE 4140

Translucent 9 / 2008 / 50.5 x 40.5 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas

TRANSLUCENT

Red Star / 2008 / 61 x 61 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas

RAIN DANCE 4140

Translucent 9 / 2008 / 50.5 x 40.5 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas

TRANSLUCENT

RAIN DANCE 4342

Ocean #2 (Lobster Monster) / 2008 / 63 x 150 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas

TRANSLUCENT

RAIN DANCE 4342

Ocean #2 (Lobster Monster) / 2008 / 63 x 150 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas

TRANSLUCENT

Constellation Red / 2008 / 61 x 61 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas / courtesy of Takanobu and Miyako Yamamoto, Japan Constellation Fire / 2008 / 61 x 61 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas / courtesy of Fusako Ekuni, Japan

RAIN DANCE 4544 TRANSLUCENT

Constellation Red / 2008 / 61 x 61 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas / courtesy of Takanobu and Miyako Yamamoto, Japan Constellation Fire / 2008 / 61 x 61 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas / courtesy of Fusako Ekuni, Japan

RAIN DANCE 4544 TRANSLUCENT

RAIN DANCE 4746

Translucent 2 / 2010 / 244 x 487 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas

TRANSLUCENT

RAIN DANCE 4746

Translucent 2 / 2010 / 244 x 487 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas

TRANSLUCENT

Constellation, Blue / 2008 / 61 x 61 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas Constellation, Opal / 2008 / 61 x 61 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas

RAIN DANCE 4948 TRANSLUCENT

Constellation, Blue / 2008 / 61 x 61 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas Constellation, Opal / 2008 / 61 x 61 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas

RAIN DANCE 4948 TRANSLUCENT

RAIN DANCE 5150

Constellation Light Blue, Red, Green / 2008 / 61 x 61 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas / courtesy of Fusako Ekuni, Japan Constellation Field, Green / 2008 / 61 x 61 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas / courtesy of Reiko Fukunaga, Japan

TRANSLUCENT

RAIN DANCE 5150

Constellation Light Blue, Red, Green / 2008 / 61 x 61 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas / courtesy of Fusako Ekuni, Japan Constellation Field, Green / 2008 / 61 x 61 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas / courtesy of Reiko Fukunaga, Japan

TRANSLUCENT

STRIPES

STRIPES

Stripe, Orange Rust / 2007 / 118 x 142.3 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas

RAIN DANCE 5554

#439 / 2007 / 122 x 244 cm / oil on canvas

STRIPES

Stripe, Orange Rust / 2007 / 118 x 142.3 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas

RAIN DANCE 5554

#439 / 2007 / 122 x 244 cm / oil on canvas

STRIPES

RAIN DANCE 5756

#441 / 2007 / 61 x 91 cm / oil on canvas

STRIPES

RAIN DANCE 5756

#441 / 2007 / 61 x 91 cm / oil on canvas

STRIPES

RAIN DANCE 5958

#440 / 2007 / 91 x 244 cm / oil on canvas / courtesy of Mary Kancer, Canada

STRIPES

RAIN DANCE 5958

#440 / 2007 / 91 x 244 cm / oil on canvas / courtesy of Mary Kancer, Canada

STRIPES

RAIN

RAIN

62

Rain 2 / 2009 / 70 x 129.5 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas

RAIN DANCE 63

Rain 1 / 2009 / 63.5 x 127 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas

RAIN

62

Rain 2 / 2009 / 70 x 129.5 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas

RAIN DANCE 63

Rain 1 / 2009 / 63.5 x 127 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas

RAIN

Rain 12 / cid rain, oil on canvas2008 / 153.6 x 141.5 cm / a Rain 14 / 2008 / 66 x 66 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas

64 RAIN DANCE 65RAIN

Rain 12 / cid rain, oil on canvas2008 / 153.6 x 141.5 cm / a Rain 14 / 2008 / 66 x 66 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas

64 RAIN DANCE 65RAIN

66 RAIN DANCE 67

River 2 / 2009 / 43.2 x 90.2 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas River 3 / 2009 / 57.2 x 75 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas

RAIN

66 RAIN DANCE 67

River 2 / 2009 / 43.2 x 90.2 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas River 3 / 2009 / 57.2 x 75 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas

RAIN

River 9 / 2009 / 59 x 110 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas

68 RAIN DANCE 69RAIN

River 9 / 2009 / 59 x 110 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas

68 RAIN DANCE 69RAIN

TEXTURE

TEXTURE

72 RAIN DANCE 73

Markings #9 / 2009 / 71 x 167.6 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas

TEXTURE

72 RAIN DANCE 73

Markings #9 / 2009 / 71 x 167.6 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas

TEXTURE

Markings #16 / 2009 / 59 x 61 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas

74 RAIN DANCE 75TEXTURE

Shadow, Yellow Detail #10 / 2009 / 95.3 x 127 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas

Markings #16 / 2009 / 59 x 61 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas

74 RAIN DANCE 75TEXTURE

Shadow, Yellow Detail #10 / 2009 / 95.3 x 127 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas

76 RAIN DANCE 77

Markings #17 / 2009 / 43.2 x 66 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas Markings #41 / 2009 / 89 x 66 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas

TEXTURE

76 RAIN DANCE 77

Markings #17 / 2009 / 43.2 x 66 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas Markings #41 / 2009 / 89 x 66 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas

TEXTURE

Markings #12 / 2009 / 62.2 x 87 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas Markings #17 / 2009 / 92 x 98.5 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas

78 RAIN DANCE 79TEXTURE

Markings #12 / 2009 / 62.2 x 87 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas Markings #17 / 2009 / 92 x 98.5 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas

78 RAIN DANCE 79TEXTURE

FLOW

FLOW

Water #24 / 2008 / 76.2 x 101.6 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas Water #23 / 2008 / 76.2 x 101.6 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas

RAIN DANCE 8382 FLOW

Water #24 / 2008 / 76.2 x 101.6 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas Water #23 / 2008 / 76.2 x 101.6 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas

RAIN DANCE 8382 FLOW

Water #5 / 2008 / 61 x 76.2 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas Water #4 / 2008 / 61 x 76.2 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas

RAIN DANCE 8584 FLOW

Water #5 / 2008 / 61 x 76.2 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas Water #4 / 2008 / 61 x 76.2 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas

RAIN DANCE 8584 FLOW

RAIN DANCE 8786

Red Objects, Shadow, Blue, Green / 2008 / 50.5 x 40.4 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas Water #111 / 2008 / 61 x 76.2 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas

FLOW

RAIN DANCE 8786

Red Objects, Shadow, Blue, Green / 2008 / 50.5 x 40.4 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas Water #111 / 2008 / 61 x 76.2 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas

FLOW

RAIN DANCE 8988

R8 / 2009 / 40.5 x 50.5 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas Water #1 / 2008 / 61 x 76.2 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas

FLOW

RAIN DANCE 8988

R8 / 2009 / 40.5 x 50.5 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas Water #1 / 2008 / 61 x 76.2 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas

FLOW

RAIN DANCE 9190

Water #2 / acid rain, oil on canvas2008 / 61 x 76.2 cm / Water #3 / acid rain, oil on canvas2008 / 61 x 76.2 cm /

FLOW

RAIN DANCE 9190

Water #2 / acid rain, oil on canvas2008 / 61 x 76.2 cm / Water #3 / acid rain, oil on canvas2008 / 61 x 76.2 cm /

FLOW

RAIN DANCE 9392

Water #23 / 2008 / 61 x 76.2 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas Water #21 / 2008 / 56 x 71 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas

FLOW

RAIN DANCE 9392

Water #23 / 2008 / 61 x 76.2 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas Water #21 / 2008 / 56 x 71 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas

FLOW

RAIN DANCE 9594

Water #22 / 2008 / 61 x 76.2 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas / courtesy of Mary Kancer, Canada R20 / 2009 / 50.5 x 50.5 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas

FLOW

RAIN DANCE 9594

Water #22 / 2008 / 61 x 76.2 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas / courtesy of Mary Kancer, Canada R20 / 2009 / 50.5 x 50.5 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas

FLOW

RAIN DANCE 9796

Water #47 / 2008 / 45.8 x 61 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas

FLOW

RAIN DANCE 9796

Water #47 / 2008 / 45.8 x 61 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas

FLOW

R11 / 2009 / 45.8 x 61 cm / acid rain, oil on canvasR34 / 2009 / 73.6 x 83.8 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas

RAIN DANCE 9998 FLOW

R11 / 2009 / 45.8 x 61 cm / acid rain, oil on canvasR34 / 2009 / 73.6 x 83.8 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas

RAIN DANCE 9998 FLOW

GRAFT

GRAFT

RAIN DANCE 103102

R43 / 2009 / 50.5 x 71.1 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas R22 / 2009 / 76.2 x 61 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas

GRAFT

RAIN DANCE 103102

R43 / 2009 / 50.5 x 71.1 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas R22 / 2009 / 76.2 x 61 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas

GRAFT

RAIN DANCE 105104

Untitled #277 / cid rain, collage, oil on canvas2009 / 51 x 76.2 cm / a R35 / 2008 / 61 x 76.2 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas

GRAFT

RAIN DANCE 105104

Untitled #277 / cid rain, collage, oil on canvas2009 / 51 x 76.2 cm / a R35 / 2008 / 61 x 76.2 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas

GRAFT

RAIN DANCE 107106

R28 / 2009 / 76.2 x 61 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas R37 / 2008 / 76.2 x 61 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas

GRAFT

RAIN DANCE 107106

R28 / 2009 / 76.2 x 61 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas R37 / 2008 / 76.2 x 61 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas

GRAFT

Untitled #9 / 2009 / 40.5 x 40.5 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas White Rain, Angular Shapes / cid rain, oil on canvas / courtesy of Mary Kancer, Canada2009 / 61 x 91 cm / a

RAIN DANCE 109108 GRAFT

Untitled #9 / 2009 / 40.5 x 40.5 cm / acid rain, oil on canvas White Rain, Angular Shapes / cid rain, oil on canvas / courtesy of Mary Kancer, Canada2009 / 61 x 91 cm / a

RAIN DANCE 109108 GRAFT

EARTH

EARTH

RAIN DANCE 113112

#346 / 2006 / 244 x 488 cm / oil on canvas

EARTH

RAIN DANCE 113112

#346 / 2006 / 244 x 488 cm / oil on canvas

EARTH

#348 / 2006 / 244 x 488 cm / oil on canvas

114 RAIN DANCE 115EARTH

#348 / 2006 / 244 x 488 cm / oil on canvas

114 RAIN DANCE 115EARTH

RAIN DANCE 117116

#345 / 2006 / 244 x 488 cm / oil on canvas #343 / 2006 / 244 x 488 cm / oil on canvas

EARTH

RAIN DANCE 117116

#345 / 2006 / 244 x 488 cm / oil on canvas #343 / 2006 / 244 x 488 cm / oil on canvas

EARTH

118

#347 / 2006 / 244 x 488 cm / oil on canvas

RAIN DANCE 119EARTH

118

#347 / 2006 / 244 x 488 cm / oil on canvas

RAIN DANCE 119EARTH

#351 / 2006 / 244 x 488 cm / oil on canvas

120 RAIN DANCE 121EARTH

#351 / 2006 / 244 x 488 cm / oil on canvas

120 RAIN DANCE 121EARTH

RAIN DANCE 123122

#352 / 2006 / 244 x 488 cm / oil on canvas

EARTH

RAIN DANCE 123122

#352 / 2006 / 244 x 488 cm / oil on canvas

EARTH

RAIN DANCE 125124 BIODATA

Viktor Mitic, a University of Toronto graduate, classically trained in European art schools, has produced a major body of work that spans a career of over two decades. Moved by the destruction of the giant Buddhas of Bamiyan – ancient artwork created in the 6th century – he recently developed a distinctive and provocative method. Mitic makes a bold statement and uses a symbol of 21st century – a gun – as a method of creation. Using both celebrities and religious figures, such as Marilyn Monroe, Jesus and John F. Kennedy, he painted portraits onto canvas and then used more than one million rounds of ammunition and various guns to outline them. The project culminated in a show, a documentary film and a book titled Art or War.

Beaverbrook Art Gallery, Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada

National Gallery of Grenada, Georgetown, Grenada

Hon. Stephen Harper, Prime Minister of Canada

Hon. Keith Mitchell, Prime Minister of Grenada

Hon. Jean Chrétien, Former Prime Minister of Canada

Hon. Gary Filmon, Former Premier of Manitoba

Hon. Preston Manning, Former Leader of the Opposition

Hon. Stockwell Day, Former Leader of the Opposition

Hon. Bob Rae, Former Premier of Ontario

Hon. Jean Augustine, M.P. Etobicoke-Lakeshore

Hon. John Manley

Hon. Pierre Pettigrew

Hon. Ken Dryden

The Art Newspaper, NYC, USA, 2011

M&C, NYC, USA, 2011

Toronto Sun, Toronto, Canada, 2011

London Free Press, London, Canada, 2011

Hindustan Times, New Delhi, India, 2011

Daily Mail, London, UK, 2010

Entertainment Tonight Canada, Canada, 2010

MTV, Canada, 2010

Global National, Canada, 2010

Canadian Press, Canada, 2010

BBC, London, UK, 2009

Globe & Mail, Jennifer Yang, Toronto, Canada, 2009

Toronto Star, Peter Goddard, Toronto, Canada, 2008

Toronto Sun, Mike Strobel, Toronto, Canada, 2009

Telegraph-Journal, Fredericton, Canada, 2009

Daily Gleaner, Fredericton, Canada, 2009

The Press Enterprise, California, USA, 2008

ArtDaily, USA, 2008

Toronto Sun, Toronto, Canada, 2009

Biggs Museum of American Art, ADd, Delaware, USA, 2008

NOTABLE COLLECTIONS & COLLECTORS

RECENTMEDIA & CRITICALREVIEW

VIKTOR MITIC

BIODATA

Mitic's most recent series entitled Rain creates an interesting partnership between our environment and art. The entire series was painted outdoors with oil paint, pigment and acid rain. The mixture of natural elements and paint creates a truly unique series that showcases the beauty of nature's contribution to the world of art and enables an unusual physical interaction between the two. The Rain series was first exhibited at the prestigious Muramatsu Gallery in Tokyo, Japan, in 2008. In 2011, Mitic debuted a painting from the series, titled 'Galaxy', at The Koerner Hall in Toronto for the 'AUTIST' charity gala. Viktor has recently had many successful solo and group shows of his paintings in Japan, Europe, and Canada, and most recently in the United States at the Armory show in NYC.

RAIN DANCE 125124 BIODATA

Viktor Mitic, a University of Toronto graduate, classically trained in European art schools, has produced a major body of work that spans a career of over two decades. Moved by the destruction of the giant Buddhas of Bamiyan – ancient artwork created in the 6th century – he recently developed a distinctive and provocative method. Mitic makes a bold statement and uses a symbol of 21st century – a gun – as a method of creation. Using both celebrities and religious figures, such as Marilyn Monroe, Jesus and John F. Kennedy, he painted portraits onto canvas and then used more than one million rounds of ammunition and various guns to outline them. The project culminated in a show, a documentary film and a book titled Art or War.

Beaverbrook Art Gallery, Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada

National Gallery of Grenada, Georgetown, Grenada

Hon. Stephen Harper, Prime Minister of Canada

Hon. Keith Mitchell, Prime Minister of Grenada

Hon. Jean Chrétien, Former Prime Minister of Canada

Hon. Gary Filmon, Former Premier of Manitoba

Hon. Preston Manning, Former Leader of the Opposition

Hon. Stockwell Day, Former Leader of the Opposition

Hon. Bob Rae, Former Premier of Ontario

Hon. Jean Augustine, M.P. Etobicoke-Lakeshore

Hon. John Manley

Hon. Pierre Pettigrew

Hon. Ken Dryden

The Art Newspaper, NYC, USA, 2011

M&C, NYC, USA, 2011

Toronto Sun, Toronto, Canada, 2011

London Free Press, London, Canada, 2011

Hindustan Times, New Delhi, India, 2011

Daily Mail, London, UK, 2010

Entertainment Tonight Canada, Canada, 2010

MTV, Canada, 2010

Global National, Canada, 2010

Canadian Press, Canada, 2010

BBC, London, UK, 2009

Globe & Mail, Jennifer Yang, Toronto, Canada, 2009

Toronto Star, Peter Goddard, Toronto, Canada, 2008

Toronto Sun, Mike Strobel, Toronto, Canada, 2009

Telegraph-Journal, Fredericton, Canada, 2009

Daily Gleaner, Fredericton, Canada, 2009

The Press Enterprise, California, USA, 2008

ArtDaily, USA, 2008

Toronto Sun, Toronto, Canada, 2009

Biggs Museum of American Art, ADd, Delaware, USA, 2008

NOTABLE COLLECTIONS & COLLECTORS

RECENTMEDIA & CRITICALREVIEW

VIKTOR MITIC

BIODATA

Mitic's most recent series entitled Rain creates an interesting partnership between our environment and art. The entire series was painted outdoors with oil paint, pigment and acid rain. The mixture of natural elements and paint creates a truly unique series that showcases the beauty of nature's contribution to the world of art and enables an unusual physical interaction between the two. The Rain series was first exhibited at the prestigious Muramatsu Gallery in Tokyo, Japan, in 2008. In 2011, Mitic debuted a painting from the series, titled 'Galaxy', at The Koerner Hall in Toronto for the 'AUTIST' charity gala. Viktor has recently had many successful solo and group shows of his paintings in Japan, Europe, and Canada, and most recently in the United States at the Armory show in NYC.

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORSCole Swanson is an artist and curator based out of Toronto. Awarded a National Arts Fellowship from the Shasti Indo-Canadian Institute, his research on regional painting in India resulted in several international projects in India, China, Taiwan and Italy. Swanson oversees the exhibition gallery and the Resident Artist Program at the Living Arts Centre in Mississauga. Recent curatorial work has focused on globalization, experimental methods and contemporary craft.

Earl Miller is an independent critic and curator residing in Toronto. He has written for numerous Canadian and international publications including Art in America, Art Asia Pacific, Border Crossings, and Flash Art. He has curated exhibitions across Canada and in South America.

Ewan Whyte is a writer and translator. He has written for the Globe & Mail and Books in Canada. His essays, short stories, poetry and translations have been published in literary journals and magazines and he has read his translations of Catullus on public radio in the U.S. His translation of the poetry of Catullus was published in 2005. He has recently completed a book of original poetry and a translation of the Odes of Horace. He lives in Toronto.

Gary Michael Dault is a writer, critic and painter. Author of a number of books and of innumerable essays for magazines, newspapers, museum and gallery catalogues, he has also written for television (Inside the Vatican with Sir Peter Ustinov) and the concert hall (Hauntings for Orchestra and Alice in the Orchestra). His sixth book of poems, The Hebdomeros Suite, will be published by Exile Editions in the fall of 2011.

RAIN DANCE 127126 ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORSCole Swanson is an artist and curator based out of Toronto. Awarded a National Arts Fellowship from the Shasti Indo-Canadian Institute, his research on regional painting in India resulted in several international projects in India, China, Taiwan and Italy. Swanson oversees the exhibition gallery and the Resident Artist Program at the Living Arts Centre in Mississauga. Recent curatorial work has focused on globalization, experimental methods and contemporary craft.

Earl Miller is an independent critic and curator residing in Toronto. He has written for numerous Canadian and international publications including Art in America, Art Asia Pacific, Border Crossings, and Flash Art. He has curated exhibitions across Canada and in South America.

Ewan Whyte is a writer and translator. He has written for the Globe & Mail and Books in Canada. His essays, short stories, poetry and translations have been published in literary journals and magazines and he has read his translations of Catullus on public radio in the U.S. His translation of the poetry of Catullus was published in 2005. He has recently completed a book of original poetry and a translation of the Odes of Horace. He lives in Toronto.

Gary Michael Dault is a writer, critic and painter. Author of a number of books and of innumerable essays for magazines, newspapers, museum and gallery catalogues, he has also written for television (Inside the Vatican with Sir Peter Ustinov) and the concert hall (Hauntings for Orchestra and Alice in the Orchestra). His sixth book of poems, The Hebdomeros Suite, will be published by Exile Editions in the fall of 2011.

RAIN DANCE 127126 ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

CODA: A PARTIAL VM ARCHIVE

CODA: A PARTIAL VM ARCHIVE

RAIN DANCE 131130 CODA: A PARTIAL VM ARCHIVE

Indira Roy Choudhury2009 / 32 x 40" / acrylic, oil, Japanese pigment, ink, gold foil on boardcollection of Trias Gallery, Canada

Odon Wagner2009 / 32 x 40" / acrylic, oil, Japanese pigment, ink, gold foil on boardcollection of Odon Wagner Gallery, Canada

Paul T. Wildridge2009 / 32 x 40" / acrylic, oil, Japanese pigment, ink, gold foil on boardcollection of Roberts Gallery, Canada

Phillip Gevik2009 / 32 x 40" / acrylic, oil, Japanese pigment, ink, gold foil on boardcollection of Gallery Gevik, Canada

Walter Moos2009 / 32 x 40" / acrylic, oil, Japanese pigment, ink, gold foil on boardcollection of Gallery Moos, Canada

“There isn’t a portrait here that doesn’t provide not only a fine likeness of its subject, but also a telling, charming, incisive route into the sitter’s essential nature.”

– Gary Michael Dault

RAIN DANCE 131130 CODA: A PARTIAL VM ARCHIVE

Indira Roy Choudhury2009 / 32 x 40" / acrylic, oil, Japanese pigment, ink, gold foil on boardcollection of Trias Gallery, Canada

Odon Wagner2009 / 32 x 40" / acrylic, oil, Japanese pigment, ink, gold foil on boardcollection of Odon Wagner Gallery, Canada

Paul T. Wildridge2009 / 32 x 40" / acrylic, oil, Japanese pigment, ink, gold foil on boardcollection of Roberts Gallery, Canada

Phillip Gevik2009 / 32 x 40" / acrylic, oil, Japanese pigment, ink, gold foil on boardcollection of Gallery Gevik, Canada

Walter Moos2009 / 32 x 40" / acrylic, oil, Japanese pigment, ink, gold foil on boardcollection of Gallery Moos, Canada

“There isn’t a portrait here that doesn’t provide not only a fine likeness of its subject, but also a telling, charming, incisive route into the sitter’s essential nature.”

– Gary Michael Dault

RAIN DANCE 135134 CODA: A PARTIAL VM ARCHIVE

Blasted Beaverbrook2008 / 102 x 152 cm / bullet holes, gold leaf, acrylic on canvascourtesy of Beaverbrook Art Gallery, Canada

Dallas2009 / 91 x 91 cm / bullet holes, gold and silver leaf, acrylic on canvascourtesy of Rafael Wagner, Canada

Benazir2009 / 91 x 91 cm / bullet holes, gold leaf, acrylic on canvascourtesy of Scarborough Arts Council, Canada

Portrait Study 82009 / 91 x 91 cm / bullet holes, gold leaf, acrylic on canvascourtesy of Kiatlim Chew, Canada

Portrait with Red Detail2009 / 102 x 152 cm / bullet holes, acrylic on canvascourtesy of Martin Bourgeois, Canada

38 Special2009 / 102 x 137 cm / bullet holes, acrylic on canvascourtesy of Lorne Gertner, Canada

Mark2011 / 76 x 101 cm / bullet holes, gold leaf, acrylic on canvascourtesy of Mark Prout, Canada

Frank Bazooka2010 / 76 x 101 cm / bullet holes, acrylic on canvascourtesy of Frank Mazzuca, Canada

Portrait in Blue (Charles Pachter)2008 / 76 x 102 cm / bullet holes, gold leaf, acrylic on canvascourtesy of Charles Pachter, Canada

Yin & Yang2009 / 61 x 61 cm / bullet holes, gold leaf, acrylic on canvascourtesy of Jennifer Yang, Canada

“Mitic [is] wielding bullets as brushes and thereby erasing the gap looming between cause and effect, between art and Act.”

– Gary Michael Dault

RAIN DANCE 135134 CODA: A PARTIAL VM ARCHIVE

Blasted Beaverbrook2008 / 102 x 152 cm / bullet holes, gold leaf, acrylic on canvascourtesy of Beaverbrook Art Gallery, Canada

Dallas2009 / 91 x 91 cm / bullet holes, gold and silver leaf, acrylic on canvascourtesy of Rafael Wagner, Canada

Benazir2009 / 91 x 91 cm / bullet holes, gold leaf, acrylic on canvascourtesy of Scarborough Arts Council, Canada

Portrait Study 82009 / 91 x 91 cm / bullet holes, gold leaf, acrylic on canvascourtesy of Kiatlim Chew, Canada

Portrait with Red Detail2009 / 102 x 152 cm / bullet holes, acrylic on canvascourtesy of Martin Bourgeois, Canada

38 Special2009 / 102 x 137 cm / bullet holes, acrylic on canvascourtesy of Lorne Gertner, Canada

Mark2011 / 76 x 101 cm / bullet holes, gold leaf, acrylic on canvascourtesy of Mark Prout, Canada

Frank Bazooka2010 / 76 x 101 cm / bullet holes, acrylic on canvascourtesy of Frank Mazzuca, Canada

Portrait in Blue (Charles Pachter)2008 / 76 x 102 cm / bullet holes, gold leaf, acrylic on canvascourtesy of Charles Pachter, Canada

Yin & Yang2009 / 61 x 61 cm / bullet holes, gold leaf, acrylic on canvascourtesy of Jennifer Yang, Canada

“Mitic [is] wielding bullets as brushes and thereby erasing the gap looming between cause and effect, between art and Act.”

– Gary Michael Dault

Viktor Mitic would like to offer special thanks to Spomenka and Borivoje Mitic for their genuine support of this exhibition and book publication. Thanks to Kiatlim Chew and Frank Mazzuca for their invaluable guidance and assistance. Additional thanks are due to Ewan Whyte, John Drajewicz and of course, Gary Michael Dault, Blair Walker, Lowell Hall and Bruce Jones. Thanks to Walter Moos and Svetlana Novikova without whose help and enthusiasm this project would not have been possible.

Thanks to the staff of Fourfront Editions for their professionalism, and especially to Allan Briesmaster, John Calabro and Maddy Curry for their unwavering vigilance and attention to detail. Special thanks to Tan Chiew Seng, Ch'ng Kiah Kiean, Lau Yong En and Suzan Beh.

Very special thanks to Charles Pachter for his genuine friendship and guidance!

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

136 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Viktor Mitic would like to offer special thanks to Spomenka and Borivoje Mitic for their genuine support of this exhibition and book publication. Thanks to Kiatlim Chew and Frank Mazzuca for their invaluable guidance and assistance. Additional thanks are due to Ewan Whyte, John Drajewicz and of course, Gary Michael Dault, Blair Walker, Lowell Hall and Bruce Jones. Thanks to Walter Moos and Svetlana Novikova without whose help and enthusiasm this project would not have been possible.

Thanks to the staff of Fourfront Editions for their professionalism, and especially to Allan Briesmaster, John Calabro and Maddy Curry for their unwavering vigilance and attention to detail. Special thanks to Tan Chiew Seng, Ch'ng Kiah Kiean, Lau Yong En and Suzan Beh.

Very special thanks to Charles Pachter for his genuine friendship and guidance!

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

136 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Printed in Malaysia

The Rain Paintings of Viktor Mitic are a kind of “aleatory art” in which natural rain is the constant companion of the artist as he creates mostly non-figurative pieces. Working outside with his canvases on the ground under the random presence of rain, thunderstorms and even hail, he achieves remarkable results. It is as if several senses are at work, creating startling and calming effects from this inspired method. The intense inner mythic-like world he has constructed complements and includes nature. As Gary Michael Dault observes: “His pictures look like something you've seen before somewhere and, simultaneously, something you've never seen before.”

“Controversial artist...”

“His art carries a powerful message.”

“Provocative… Viktor Mitic is blasting preconceptions…”

“Controversial…”

“Provocative art…”

"Mitic...[attacks] the sanctimony of painting."

Daily Mail, UK

Entertainment Tonight Canada

Global TV National

Mark Coles, BBC

Peter Goddard, Toronto Star

Gary Michael Dault

Included as an additional bonus is a film by Alaembic Productions, directed by Brahm Rosensweig, of the artist at work, with commentary by Gary Michael Dault, art critic,author; Ewan Whyte, poet,writer; Pamela Edmonds, curator; Charles Pachter, artist, historian; and Cole Swanson, curator, Living Arts Mississauga.