Then he began lifting his calls of longing to the sky, offering the scent of sacrifice and the most beautiful thing he was able to find on this earth: flowers. He noticed close to him the nuances of colors he had searched for. The joy and dreaminess of the sky were within his reach after all. In creation he discerned the Maker, the great painter who had painted the flowers in the fields, hewn the mountains, and played magnificently with the shapes of trees. The beauty of the sky is, after all, reflected in creation, the utmost in beauty among us is closer than man had initially dared to hope! He became aware that he could most easily commune with the heavens, and be linked to the gods, through beauty. Let the most exquisite notes fly upward, let a harmony of colors embrace an iridescent sky, let the lavish composition of a blossom tell the deities that man wishes to belong to them.

Man does indeed carry within him nostalgia for lost happiness. He feels like an exiled person who has lost his home of happiness and beauty. This is the tragic sentiment of lost paradise, or the awareness of the disappearance of paradise depicted by myths and described also in the Bible. But man can address the issue of the lost paradise in various ways. He can curse the darkness and bemoan his feelings of bitterness. He can give in to rage and destroy all that remains of beauty with violent forms. Or he can try to find the lost happiness again, and illuminate the gloomy world with vestiges of light. Either way he will soon realize that the lost paradise can never be found again, can not be retrieved from memory; it can only be re-created anew.

And what has happened in our era? The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche said that the gods had left the sky and that the world had become disenchanted. They had grown tired of imitation, bored with man lacking in imagination and creativity. If we develop Nitzsche's metaphor for the tragic sensation of our century further, we can add that gods left traces of themselves when they left the company of human sons and daughters. They forgot behind a few remnants of Beauty. They did not take with them all the blossoms still sparkling with the colors of the sky, the sea and the playfulness of stars. The harmony of tones and the colorful vivacity of flowers are reminders that gods used to live in our midst. These are the traces of beauty an artist follows; the painter Veselka äorli-Puc, also, seems reluctant to succumb to the tragic despair of the futility of everyday searching and striving. The resumed search for beauty, the renewed creativity or poiesis in the finest sense of the word, reveal the hope that godliness may yet again populate the heavens and the earth, and that man may again merit speech which can transcend him and carry him beyond himself. Nietzsche also predicts the eventual return of the gods when man is again worthy of communicating with them, when he no longer hides either his smallness or secret joy, his curiosity or his elation, when he again dares to be wholly man; hence, when he admits that it is most beautiful to be a child.

At this point a question arises: How to be a child in Nietzsche's sense? How to be an artist at the end of the second millennium? Undeniably, an artist creates when inspired by his or her most genuine feelings. And that is what it is all about. An artist must have the courage to address the issue of beauty, even if it be hidden in frailty, simplicity, smallness. He or she needs courage to speak about the genuineness noticeable in a blade of grass or in the common mallow, in the helplessness of the wisteria or the short-lived pulse of the magnolia. Yes, to find beauty in minor things and to admit that the sumptuousness of colors begins in the blossom, just as joy and smiles awaken in the spring.

Translated by Tamara Soban