Dragana Crnjak
painting and drawing
Dragana Crnjak is Serbian-American interdisciplinary artist whose work diagrams the relationships between history and present, domestic and public spaces, memory and perception. She received her MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia in 2004, and is a recipient of Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Awards in Visual Arts, Distinguished Professorship in Scholarship at Youngstown State University and Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Professional Fellowship. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and collected by numerous private and public collections. She is Professor of Art at Youngstown State University where she teaches painting and drawing. She lives and works in Boardman, OH.
Dragana Crnjak’s studio practice is fueled by a deep curiosity and a persistent engagement with the concepts of time and impermanence. Loosely grounded in imagery derived from natural forms and peripheral glimpses of fleeting moments in everyday environments, her recent paintings reflect an impulse to suspend fixed meaning in favor of a deeper experience of presence and duration. The visual language is simultaneously detectable and fragmented, evoking formations that are suggestive enough to stir curiosity and propose potential new structures. Rooted in tensions between the physical and intangible, the permanent and the transient, her work is further animated by a fascination with color and light as tools to underscore the ephemeral nature of the world, as well as the complex dynamics of engagement and withdrawal.
In her site-specific wall drawings—executed with compressed charcoal directly onto gallery walls—Crnjak explores the act of visual navigation within architectural boundaries. These drawings present fragmented, unstable forms that invite viewers into a process of movement, spatial awareness, and open-ended contemplation. By harnessing the materiality and inherent impermanence of compressed charcoal, the work embraces its contradictory capacity to suggest both motion and temporal depth within stillness. Through these material and conceptual dichotomies, the artist evokes a sense of impermanence while centering the viewer’s experiential journey as integral to the work.
