Bio 

Dragana Crnjak is a Serbian American artist and educator whose studio practice is grounded in painting and drawing. She earned her MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia, and is a distinguished recipient of four Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Awards in Visual Arts, a Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Professional Fellowship and a Distinguished Professorship in Scholarship and Teaching at Youngstown State University. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and collected by numerous private and public collections including Art in Embassies in Serbia and Bosnia, Akron Art Museum, the University of Chicago, Herron School of Art and Design, Kathryn Markel Gallery in New York City and Urban Institute for Contemporary Art in Grand Rapids, MI. She is a Professor of Art at Youngstown State University, where she teaches painting and drawing. 

Artist Statement

Painting continues to offer a unique potential to generate new ways of looking, seeing, and understanding the world while reflecting my desire to suspend meaning for a deeper experience of time and presence. It opens a space where cognition begins with the body and the eye, where sensing and perceiving occur before interpretation fully takes hold. I am especially drawn to the space between memory and anticipation, where an image feels both remembered and still emerging.

What interests me is never only what is visible, but what continues to unfold through sustained looking. This tension between the singular, fixed object of a painting and the fluid experience of time it stimulates underscores the ephemeral qualities of the world around us, as well as my need to engage and retreat at the same time.  Through the forest as both subject and metaphorical structure, the paintings invite and explore perception as an active process, where nothing remains fully fixed and every act of looking generates change.