Lumbarda

During his two-month stay on the island of Korčula in the summer of 1933, Job painted several landscapes of high artistic value. This brief period represents one of the pinnacles of Job’s work. Two paintings stand out among those created then. They were obviously painted in the countryside at Lumbarda, more precisely on the locality called Vela (Velika) Glavica, so that they are listed in the literature as Vela Glavica I and Vela Glavica II. Their other names are Lumbarda I and Lumbarda II. The first version is in the Modern Gallery in Zagreb and the other one is in The Pavle Beljanski Memorial Collection. In a sense, these paintings should be observed as a complementary pair: both depict the same motif – several houses in the middle, among them a square gray house with a jagged end stands out, and all this lies within a walled garden whose arched door is in the lower left corner. In the background, there are hills with a wavy outline. While in the Zagreb painting Job attempts to give as much visual information as possible, the other version is free from this and he completely surrenders to an unrestricted recording of elementary landscape features. The painting Lumbarda II (Vela Glavica II) is dominated by a warm, searing red ochre of the soil which, in a triangular ascent, brings us closer to the background where the buildings are situated, and behind them are yellow hills whose colour varies from greenish tones to a sulfur-like yellow. The two rectangles of the vermilion red roofs from the upper half of the painting represent a certain form of counterbalance to the dominant surface of the reddish soil in the lower part. The painting was done in several easily discernible, swift and dynamic brushstrokes, without hesitation. This is by no means a replica of the first painting, but it seems as if in the painting from the Beljanski collection Job wished to demonstrate the ease of creation which does not turn into virtuosity, but rather reveals sincere spontaneity.