Near the path I passed almost daily through the woods, for months a young oak tree lay crudely cut down. The obvious senselessness of this death made me anxious - I could not grasp why someone would fell a young tree only to leave it lying there. It was around this time that I saw a self-portrait of painter Igor Roncevic, who depicted himself with an axe in his hands.

Paint the canvas as if one half were placed in the sun and the other in the shade, aiming to create an illusion of light spreading unevenly over the entire picture. Use metallic-looking tones of gray and contaminate them with a few warm tones. Treat the surface extensively with great care, until you are sure that it emits a feeling of heaviness and appears like a leaden plate lit by a pale light.

The line rising plastically over the painted surface of the canvas accentuates the specific quality of both the painted object and the underlying surface, while the surface for its part creates the atmosphere and defines the emotional perception of the painted object. The descriptively painted detail adds to this a narrative element, which, together with the painted surface and the painted object, produces a set of visual associations offered to the viewer.

The paintings presented in this section were first exhibited under the title "Paintings 1998-1999" at the Arteria Gallery in Zagreb in 1999.