Low tide Painting

Mirsad Mehulic was born in 1950 in Zagreb. When he was a young student of economics, Mehulic was strongly attracted to painting. At first, the art expression of this gifted auto-didact was not more than a certain exposure, playfulness and an attempt to escape the monotony of everyday life. A keen approval of people in his surroundings, from art dealers to renowned painters defined more firmly his position and role in painting. A graduated economist, Mehulic soon came to an existential crossroad which he passed successfully, managing to reconcile the irreconcilable.What followed his successful career as a marketing expert, graphic designer and an entrepreneur, was his fruitful art work. In that parallel life that was more or less public, Mehulic was immersed in his personal vision of nature. It was concretized in the technique of oil on canvas and, more unconventional, oil on glass. Around 1990, the artist discovered the technique of painting in water-colours and its finesses that he was developing meticulously in the following fifteen years. His earlier absorption in continental paysage was replaced by his fascination with water, rivers, lakes and particularly, sea waters, which he depicts in a duly realist manner.Exactly water, air and not many other things. Emphasizing again and again that he is a realist, Mirsad Mehulic sends a message to the observer that, in his life, he wants to deal only with the Essential. Indeed, his compositions are purified from all the excess and they are most often reduced to glittering water, ascetic stone and bluish air. The absence of a human is a common feature of all his paintings. And yet, every painting is marked by his personal touch. A boat, in the shallow water, by a pier, on the open sea or inside a safe port of a taciturn stony town, stops being merely an object. The artist elevates it to the level of a metaphysical symbol.This silent protagonist of his paintings, abandoned by the man, is the man's connection with distant, unsettling high sea water and wide open spaces. It is a mediator of an exciting unique experience. Therefore, it is not strange that the observer's eye is taken off a Mehulic's painting with great difficulty. It offers him peacefulness at first, but then there comes a question.What is really the Essential in your life? Free from vanity and an imperative of to climb frenetically the Olympus of art milieu, Mehulic has formed himself into a fully relaxed artist.