The Fluid and Dancing Lines of a Woman

Onutė Gaidamavičiūtė

February 2025

Eva Miliūnienė enjoys creating series of paintings. The most memorable of these painting cycles are “The Tailed Ones Adorn Themselves”, “The Farm of Ąžuolas”, “Ballet Class”, “Childish Stories,” “A Dog’s Life. Cat Days”, and the portraits cycle.

Eva Miliūnienė’s particularly charming impressionistic painting series “The Farm of Ąžuolas” creates a cheerful, summery atmosphere of a sunny day by using light color tones. In it, a little boy and his animal friends enjoy the sunny day. One could say that, when looking at these paintings, one feels the shimmering, glowing, and even vibrating essence of a summer day.

The painting series “Ballet Class” also stands out with its unique ethereal quality, subtlety, and aesthetic charm, with the graceful movements, plasticity, and nuance of the young ballerinas being particularly captivating. The impressionistic vibrancy of light, soft colors – blues, light blues, and yellows – enhances the overall effect.

Eva Miliūnienė’s paintings are characterized by light colors, subtle tones, and half-tones, as well as the vibrancy and resonance of brushstrokes. She also strives to psychologize the subjects she portrays, both humans and animals.

Eva Miliūnienė’s newest solo painting exhibition, “Women’s Lines”, opened at the Birštonas Kurhaus on February 8 this year and will run until March 8. The exhibition showcases paintings created between 2019 and 2025.

In this series of seventeen paintings, the artist conveys the graceful elegance of a woman’s body lines, captured in delicate brushstrokes. The dominant color palette of this exhibition includes yellows, browns, and blues, especially noticeable in paintings with the word Yellow in their titles: “I Am Brave,” “Chamomile Tea,” “Yellow Allusion,” “The Courage of the Yellow Wind,” and “Yellow – The Color of Unspoken Words.” One might wonder about the symbolic meaning of the color yellow. After all, it is the color of the sun and light.

The paintings reveal the subtle grace, elegance, and beauty of the female form. I would say that the woman’s body is aestheticized, almost ethereally lifted above earthly reality.

The relationship between the female figure(s) and the painting’s background is particularly interesting. Sometimes, the space appears deep and nuanced, while at other times, it seems somewhat flat (as if it is made up of vertical, often light-colored stripes, streaks, or lines resembling a zebra’s pattern). One particularly subtle painting is Between the Stripes of Light. In the center of the painting is a blue-toned silhouette of a graceful woman in a blue dress and hat. The woman’s body forms are graceful, elegant, and subtly nuanced, revealing a delicate play of light and shadow. The woman’s body is framed by vertically striped yellow and white lines. The yellow background lines subtly match the color of the woman’s face.

A subtle, melancholic mood and the grace of the woman’s body are unveiled in the painting “Autumn Light Within Me”. This is one of the rarer paintings in The Lines of a Woman series, where the focus is not, for example, on the woman’s legs or back, but rather on her face (though her legs are also present). The woman’s orange hair (curls) is depicted in an especially delicate way. The painting is dominated by nuanced shades of pale colors, which contrast with the woman’s orange curls.

Another distinctive painting is “Polka-dot Levitation”, in which a graceful woman with orange hair moves in a short spotted dress. One gets the impression that her hair is flowing in the wind. The background of this painting is rendered in such a way that it creates the illusion of depth in space (with a subtle palette of lightening and darkening brown tones).

A distinctive work is also the painting “Symphony in Blue”. Unlike other paintings in the exhibition, this one features flat brushstrokes and a particularly delicate background. The blue-toned female figure, located at the center of the painting, mysteriously melts into the blue background, creating a kind of blueness that later transitions into dark blue in a circular form.

In the plastic portrayal of the body and the impressionistic treatment of the images, one can see the connection between this “Women’s Lines” series and “Ballet class” series.

It can be said that the paintings exhibited in this exhibition stand out due to their exceptional plasticity, elegance, dynamic movement, and, I would say, even musicality. Each painting is like a distinct symphony, distinguished by different nuances of brushstrokes, a unique interpretation of space, and extraordinary professionalism, maturity of style, and openness to new creative explorations.

Onutė Gaidamavičiūtė. The Fluid and Dancing Lines of a Woman. www.radikaliai.lt February 8, 2025