Artrn Trnski to Publish Two Drawing Books Spanning Student Years to Present

Croatian painter Artrn Trnski is preparing two drawing books for publication, each running roughly 200 pages and drawing on nearly his entire archive, from student work to recent pieces. He describes drawing as the structural foundation of an artist's practice, comparing it to a blueprint for building a house, and cites critics who say authorship can be read from a drawing the way a beast is identified by its tracks. Trnski splits his year between countryside and city, and the division shapes two parallel bodies of work: houses, lakes, meadows, animals and rural figures on one side, crowds, noise and urban color on the other. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts after secretly sitting the entrance exam against his mother's wish that he pursue medicine, passing among 12 accepted from 160 candidates. Museum visits in Zagreb, Vienna, Paris, Amsterdam and New York, plus the work of Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, the Bauhaus and Lucian Freud, formed his early visual education. He works across oil, acrylic and pencil, often mapping a restless child's portrait in pencil before finishing in acrylic. Croatia's contrasts — northern plains and oak forests, southern mountains and Mediterranean coast — he calls the treasury that feeds his painting.