When Danilo Pravica came to W.A. in 1997 from what was Yugoslavia he brought with him a knowledge of European traditions, and an academic training. These can be clearly seen in the imagery that he uses (landscape and figure studies) and in the skill with which he handles both paint and print media. A great deal of commitment and dedication to his art is also evident.  Some artists who produce art on a regular basis become repetitious, tired and formulaic. Pravica does not do this.  While motifs and thematic concerns keep reappearing, they are always in new, fresh and sometimes unexpected configurations, and there are also new forms emerging.
 
Pravica’s European heritage is also evident in the ideas that he explores. Many of these ideas have been inspired by his reading of poetry, especially that of Charles Baudelaire, best known for his Fleurs du Mal (Flowers of Evil). Baudelaire was concerned with all those opposing experiences of life - joy and pain, suffering and serenity, spiritually uplifting experiences and disturbing experiences, and he believed that these could be reconciled in a type of transcendence.  Where he differed from other visionaries and thinkers was that he believed that this transcendence could take place not in a world beyond the physical but within it, through sensuality. Sensuality may seem self indulgent, even decadent, but when experienced together with a spiritual frame of mind it is transcendent.

Baudelaire was a critic as well as a poet and as a Modernist critic he believed in the right of artists to exercise their individual imaginations.  He also believed in the concept of beauty.  He explained that beauty was created when form and colour worked together in harmony.  Kandinsky put this idea in a more accessible and more poetic way in his treatise Concerning the Spiritual in Art. Kandinsky explains that a form can be just an outline representing an object, but properly speaking it is only the outward expression of inner meaning. His idea was that outward form rests on a corresponding vibration of the human soul.

The shapes in these large, colourful canvases are based on the human figure, but their inner meanings and 'corresponding vibrations' are much more.  They float and drift in a space that is somewhere above the ground, but beneath the heavens. They don’t have a clearly defined form, but they do have presence. They are suspended in space, but they are also moving – on some sort of journey.  Whether their destination is predetermined or not determined at all is difficult to say.  Are they lost souls, or are they on their way to a higher existence? They seem to be moving upwards, some of them have already extended beyond the upper limits of the canvas.

Figure and ground ambiguities create complexities of shape and space implying the interconnectedness of all things, including the physical and the spiritual.  Out of these complexities of space and viewing points there frequently arises a figure, outlined in glowing colour, and floating upwards out of the frame. At the same time the background colours also become pure and clear, as if to indicate the attainment of some heavenly sphere.

In Evening Harmony a group of figures rises up together with an ethereal figure which has already risen beyond the frame. A central figure holds what could be a lighted candle.  The arm holding the candle is outlined in red, which contrasts with similarly shaped marks in green within the figures. Short, sharp diagonal lines within the figures seem to impede but not prevent the general upward movement into a cool, calm, blue sky.  Rising from the earthly realm has been accomplished, but it is not without pain and struggle.  This sense of struggle to attain freedom from earthly realities is particularly strong in those paintings where reds and violets predominate. In a couple of works there is also a merging of figures into a large upward looking face.  Perhaps the suggestion here is that the journey is for individual human souls to come together in one universal soul.

Kandinsky thought that colour also had these two aspects – outward expression and inner meaning.  Colours have both definite and indefinite qualities.  They have definite shades (of blue or red) and they occupy a definite proportion of the canvas.  But they also have powerful suggestive vibrations – red for the earth and blue for the heavens – red for alarm and anxiety and blue for peace and spirituality.  In addition to using colour symbolically, Pravica also allows the paint to be thickly impastoed where he wants to suggest struggle, stress or suffering. It is then smoothed evenly when he wants to suggest the attainment of harmony. Strokes and splashes of underpainting show through just where he wants them to, and complementary contrasts create movement just where he wants it.

There is usually a darker shade (red or blue) at the bottom, and lighter shades towards the top.  This works together with the shapes to suggest an upward movement and a more harmonious existence at higher levels.  But perhaps the transition from bottom to top is not an easy one.  The darker shades suggest a force or an energy holding them down.  Sometimes they are not all red or all blue. In one, the figure floating out of the frame is basically red, but emerges out of a blue background. Does this mean that some of the pain from an earthly existence continues into the next world?  Some of the figures are outlined in beautiful, luminous colours – like an aura perhaps.  Does this suggest yet another state of being, or a melting away into pure light?

In his landscapes and seascapes Pravica suggests movement and evolution through multiple and gradually changing, horizontal panels. The landscapes begin with dark red, earthy colours sweeping inwards and upwards and gradually evolving into green and blue and then shimmering white.  Finally they reach an expanse of pure blue sky.  In the seascapes there is the same upward sweep of form and colour, but the blues predominate.  The multiplicity of panels means that there is no identifiable horizon line.  One reality merges into the next in a series of transformations.

Baudelaire speaks of contrasting movements - upwards towards the heavens where eternity ‘dreams’ and downwards towards the abyss, or the tomb. Some artists and poets have tried to reconcile these opposing movements by passing beyond them into a transcendent space. Baudelaire and Pravica both achieve transcendence not so much by moving beyond as by bringing the ‘double movements’ and different realities together in rhythmical and poetic harmonies.