Based in Kaunas, Lithuania, Violeta Jarašiūnienė creates art under the name ViJa Art. Her lifelong devotion to painting has deepened over the years, as she gradually honed her skills with canvas and paints. Violeta’s path as an artist began modestly—her debut exhibition took place in 2008 at the community centre in Betygala, located in the Raseiniai district, and subsequently at the Betygala Museum. For about ten years, painting remained a quiet and tentative endeavor, a creative escape woven in with her daily routine. It was during the quarantine period that art reclaimed a central role in her life, sparking new exhibitions in Kaunas (2021), Vilnius (2022), and at the Zanavykiai Museum in Lukši, Raseiniai (2023).
Violeta approaches her work in an intuitive and impulsive manner. She does not plan her compositions in advance but allows her choices of color and emotion to shape the piece as it unfolds. Music is always present while she paints, its rhythms and melodies subtly stirring her brush and influencing the palette. Describing her method, she compares the merging of colors to how experiences, dreams, and emotions blend in life—ever seeking harmony, gentleness, and completeness. Careful attention is given to every section of the canvas, ensuring that no detail, no matter how small, is neglected.
The completed paintings materialize as enigmatic, dreamlike scenes—images that resist description, evoking snippets of a fairy tale or passing daydreams. Each piece functions like an encoded narrative or a secret, inviting those who view it to unravel its mysteries for themselves. Violeta often adds poems or short tales to accompany her art, conceiving of each painting as if it were a book meant to be read and rediscovered again and again. She believes viewers who engage with her work embark on their own journey, searching for hidden meanings and personal discoveries within the layers of each painting.
Violeta invites all to lose themselves in her art, encouraging them to find their own happiness, fears, and dreams within the canvas’ complex details. She likens this experience to stepping into a fairy tale, with the viewer cast as the hero—wandering through scenes shaped by emotion and fantasy, pursuing answers and welcoming self-understanding. Her paintings trace a journey from the past into the present, inviting people to release their sadness and enter a vibrant realm of color, hope, and safety. Through this artistic process, Violeta seeks to kindle moments of awe and connection, transforming art into a magical portal for self-discovery.
About this artwork+
The painting depicts the serene yet haunting image of a sheep's face emerging from a rugged, undulating landscape. The sheep's eyes are large and filled with an expression that is both intimate and mysterious, drawing the viewer into the scene. This central image is cradled by a misty and ethereal background, which blurs into clouds of soft greys and pinks at the upper portion, suggesting either the breaking of dawn or the settling of dusk. In the surroundings, the landscape loosely transitions into surrealistic elements. To the right, a distant, tapering hill or mound rises, topped with sparse trees and a lone spike-like structure, perhaps a tower or steeple, that adds a ghostly touch of civilization to the otherwise wild scene. This structure, along with the hill, is faded and almost dissolves into the background sky, reinforcing a dreamlike quality. On the left, the foreground features what resembles a cascading cliff or a barrier of some sort, from which white and grey strokes flow downward like waterfalls or heavy rain, merging seamlessly with the earth tones below. The textural contrast in the painting is pronounced; the fluffy, rough wool of the sheep against the smooth, flowing verticality of the waterfall-like elements offers a tactile disparity that enriches the visual experience. Each component in the artwork, from the introspective gaze of the sheep to the enigmatic structures and the fluid, almost melting landscapes, contributes to a feeling of deep, reflective solitude, capturing the essence of what might be envisioned as the 'depth of the earth'—a place of profound natural beauty and mystery.
