Emilija Pasagic is a native of Belgrade in the former Yugoslavia. Formally educated in landscape architecture, she worked in Europe for several years. She arrived in Canada in 1993, where she continues to live with her family.

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Pasagic was inspired to become an artist at an early age, always painting and drawing. Her work now is inspired by the intensity and drama of relationships between people and emotions.  Her paintings are an outlet, a way of showing pain and love in a medium that doesn’t invoke either. When asked how she chooses her subjects, she replied “my tulips and dancing fruit (my people) choose me; either they want to be painted or they don’t.” Her present artistic focus is still life paintings, particularly of fruit and flowers executed in a richly textured encaustic medium.  The happy placement of flower and fruits seemingly narrate life’s journeys. They tell stories of being together or apart and of creating identity.

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Her technique involves a unique blending of bee’s wax and oil paint applied to paper, board, or canvas. Using a similar technique of encaustic painting, the paint is sometimes blended into the hot wax, burnt into it or simply painted upon it.

 

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