In collaboration with Vida Fakin’s family, the Living Field is pleased to open these pages on our web site from April 2016.
Vida Fakin, nee Lojk, was born on 6 April 1915 in Ljubljana, Slovenia and died on 10 June 2001.
Her art and life will be presented in the coming weeks and months, beginning with an exhibition of her works held in 2015 at the Jožef Stefan Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia. Her family arranged for the exhibition guide (leaflet) to be translated from Slovene into English and it can be found at this link on this site: Exhibition Ljubljana 2015: Slovene Identity – elevated into a cosmic vision.
Editor’s note
Travelling in Slovenia, the massive scale of the Julian Alps and extensive upland pasture is repeatedly reduced to a human scale by rural hand-works: orchards, enclosure, sheds, woodpiles, tiers of bee-hives, but most of all by the many hay-racks that are built to hold and dry grass that has been cut for feeding animals over the winter.
These personal, individual, human structures give the place an identity rarely found in Europe. The ikons of rural activity in Britain tend to be from a previous time – the mounds and circles of stone and bronze ages or the rigs and field patterns of recent centuries no longer worked.
In Slovenia, the ikons are alive and present. And it is these that the artist Vida Fakin has sought to capture in her paintings. But not as conventional landscape art. Agriculture exists on flows of energy and matter and it is these that the artist captures. Nothing is static – accumulation and flux are evident among hay-racks, mountains, forests, the moon and the landscape’s fantastic creatures.
Publications
A history of her life and art – with many page-size images of her large paintings – was published in Slovenia almost 30 years ago: Vida Fakin, Monografia. Ljubljana – Enotnost, 1994.
The editor is very pleased to have received a copy of this excellent book gifted by Vida’s family. The cover is shown below.
Links on this web site
Memories of Mojca – recollections of Vida by her daughter
Exhibition – Slovene Identity
More than landscape (2), Hay-racks
Acknowledgements
Images and photographs on these pages were provided by Vida Fakin’s family – Mojca Suklje, Helena Suklje, Marko Debeljak.
Ed: page updated 26 June 2023 with additional images.