Tamara Jovandic-Everson – The Critique

Tamara Jovandic-Everson is an extraordinary painter who delicately balances abstract and representational imagery and its interplay between the control of powerful, exquisite colour and form. Tamara eliminates background, ornament and even occasionally outline, and together with her skilful use of light and chiaroscuro, inspired by her love for Caravaggio, characterises her intensely dramatic and impassioned style.

Tamara’s paintings invite the viewer into a world of underlying anguish and travail with her fiery passionate colours, visionary nature and forceful and dynamic technique, through which she achieves maximum emotional impact and an extraordinarily expressionistic quality.

In her abstract works, the freedom of execution and the broad tempestuous strokes of paint sweep over the canvas in heavily bold formation. Areas of colour intensified by the contrasting gleams of light give Tamara’s paintings a frenetic energy that simmers with passion. Her bold brushstrokes and her deep rich colours, applied with strong and forceful gestures, reflect the artist’s own sensitivities and state of mind.

Tamara doesn’t restrict herself to pure abstraction though. The nude female body is her main figurative subject. Her depictions of women are painted from live models to highlight the profound feminism and unapologetic eroticism that provides no distraction, and allows us to gaze at Tamara’s representation of these women’s perturbed and tormented intrinsic beauty. A mysterious sensuality draws us into her daringly painted, uneasily provocative and challengingly sexual canvases. Only the body is fully realised, the face is intentionally implied representing the collective, universal suffering of the human condition.

Tamara Jovandic-Everson talks to our most suppressed unconscious thoughts. Her works are a captivating voyage into our own depths and darkness. A cathartic experience that leaves us with questions to answer that cannot be prorogued any longer.

Carl Gustav Jung said: “Man’s task is to become conscious of the contents that press upward from the unconscious”. When we cannot fulfil that task due to defences and superstructures, there are artists, like Tamara Jovandic-Everson that enlighten and help us accomplish it.

Karen Lappon
International Confederation of Art Critics

http://international-confederation-art-critics.org/tamara-jovandic-everson-critique

Paintings by Tamara Jovandic

The powerful Tamara Jovandic brings new life to the traditional concept of the nude in art. Sexual images involving bondage and the body before coitus – submission and freedom of the body to act within its environment – are re-interpreted in the art of Tamara Jovandic into submission of the human body to the bondage of pain itself. Freeing of the body is suggested by the occasional appearance of a horseman, freeing the captured female from the threat of the dragon. Indeed the dragon has gone from many of these paintings – the female body has itself won.

The bold stroke of Tamara Jovandic re-awaken new human reaction to the theme of nude, passing beyond the erotic into the urgent vigour of the best of art throughout time

Marian Wenzel
Art Historian

Critical Review

“The powerful work of Tamara Jovandic-Everson brings the new life to the traditional concept of nude in art”

“The bold strokes of Tamara Jovandic-Everson reawaken new human reaction to the theme of the nude, passing beyond the erotic into the urgent vigour of the best of art throughout the art”

“The paintings of Tamara Jovandic-Everosn depict the individual in contention with himself. With her superb handling of texture and bold composition, on a nearly black ground, she deals with the anguish of the individual within which he or she is totally alone, as much as are ancient Pompeians who survive to use as cats, and who, although placed next to each other in the museum, are alone in their own agony. Her pictures can be erotic, but with solitary eroticism.

Marian Wenzel
Art Historian