The Gate

Laima Drazdauskaitė's painting The Gate was created in 1989. The work is from the artist's later creative period. The focus of the painting is a small light blue gate with crisscrossed grating. The left door of the gate is closed, and the right side is open. Beyond the gate we can see hills painted in pale colors, while across the entire plane of the painting we see a proliferation of blackish, wavy lines.
The painting is typical of Laima Drazdauskaitė's work: since the start of her artistic journey, the Kaunas-born painter has always preferred grayish, pale and muted colors. The same is true here: we see moss green, a muddy cherry color, yellow, and a dark gray. The only brighter color accent is the blueness of the gate. In her work, the artist chooses the environment as a motif, and most often – nature itself. But specific objects are only a starting point. Nature is very important to the artist – as a source of inspiration, and as an environment that helps to gather one's thoughts. But this nature is always only real in part. In the painting The Gate we can see the artist's characteristic encounter between reality and the imagination. The gate in the painting is very real. Anyone who has been to the Botanical Park in Palanga has seen it. The park was created in the late 19th century under the patronage of Count Feliksas Tiškevičius. This gate stands at one of the entrances to the park.
But we see no park beyond the gate in this painting. The flat hills are more reminiscent of sand dunes. Reality ends at the gate, and the imagined world of the artist begins, together with the particular challenges of the painting's creation. "The realistic motif refused to surrender, but once the dry dunes appeared in the background, everything fell into place," recounts the painter. The park's well-groomed trees and paths did not fit into the artist's concept; they were replaced with sand dunes – yellow and endless. The gate no longer opened into the cultural oasis of a manor house, but rather into a free natural phenomenon – dunes that one can wander through endlessly, associated with the sea and the lagoon. Beyond the gate, a journey begins.