Sava Sekulic (1902-1989), a Croatian-born Serb, is perhaps the most interesting self-taught artist to emerge from the former Yugoslavia. His work is regarded as having affinities with art-brut and naïve art, but far darker in feeling then most naives. Born in the village of Bilisani in Croatia, Sekulic was first inspired to begin painting and writing poetry by his father, who told him, "...my child, write with stone on stone. Learn to work with your hands. And if you write down what comes into your mind, nobody will say this belongs to me. Everybody will say this is yours."

Sekulic earned his living as a day laborer, agricultural worker, factory worker, and bricklayer. Sekulic taught himself how to read and write and signed his works "CCC" meaning "SSS" in the Cyrillic alphabet and standing for Sava Sekulic Samuk, "Samuk" meaning self taught. He began to paint and write in 1932, although much of his early work was destroyed in Second World War. From his retirement in 1962 he was able to devote all his time to painting and poetry. Sava Sekulic had a hard and harrowing life and faced continual rejection in his struggle as an artist. He eventually began exhibiting in 1964. The paintings reveal the way in which the unfailingly fresh imagination of the painter and poet lent exceptional immediacy to his vision of the "link between all living things". *

Public Collections: Museum of Naive Art, Jagodina; Musée International d'Art Naif, Anatole Jakovsky, Nice; National Gallery, Scotland, Various Museums in Germany, Museum of Native Art Paris, Outsider Archive, Ireland.

*from "Legend of My own Life" The Charlotte Zander Museum And Sava Sekulic, by Ruth Handler, Raw Vision #26, Spring 1999.