Born on the 21st of July, 2001, in Stuttgart, Germany.
Andrijan is a Croatian, self taught landscape and portrait painter, with interests in music, philosophy, culture, history, architecture, languages and on top of all, art & drawing.
In 2021 he started to study the croatian language, philosophy and culture at the university of Zagreb.
Andrijan Kovacic is a selftaught artist. He discovered his talent in 2013, as he was doodeling sketches and drawing graffitis. In 2016 he started drawing rough portraits by eye, without any fundamental knowledge, it is also the year that he picked up oil painting on canvas, painting several different landscapes and starting to sell his works. Since 2020 Andrijan is beign serious about beign an artist, he started picking up the fundamentals of drawing portraits and is on his way to start studying art in the university of Zagreb.
He applied his portfolio of works to the University of Fine Arts in Zagreb in June 2021. The university accepted his works and therefore, Andrijan was participating in a competition with 33 others, who applied for the study program of painting/fine art. The task was to draw 2 portraits and 2 nude drawings on a 70x100cm sized paper, stretched on a wooden board, in charcoal. Over a span of 2 days, each with a time limit of 3 hours. There was also an exam in general knowledge that the students had to take. Furthermore, he needed to paint 2 portraits and 2 nudes with e.g. acrylic colours over another 2 more days.
Unfortunentaly, he got rejected by the university. The reasson why, is a good question. Which has not been anwsered yet. There are many aspects that could have been the case, tho, one thing is certain, this was not a straight forward proccess. Under the circumstances and the means that he had, he did not give up on his artistic journey, he worked harder and started to read books on anatomy, watched online courses about that topic and works on beign accepted in 2022.
In 2016, Andrijan started to paint in colours, with oil colours. He watched all of the episodes of the joy of painting by Bob Ross. You can see the heavy influence that he had on him. It was a good introduction into painting with colours and it was fun, that is the most important aspect. The “immidiate” results that could be achieved in one painting session, were a huge confidence booster. Altough, this was just the beginning of yet to come, long journey.
In 2018, Andrijan started to detach from the bob ross era into a aspiring search of individuality. He started to look closely at reference photos and portrait the landscape paintings in the way he saw them. He did not try to copy anybody else.
As he went along and practiced more and more, his artwork started to look better and better. He learned alot from searching for anwsers on the internet, learing colour theories, compostion, values, ligh & shadows and so on. All of his interest in the subject and his eagerness for greatness can be seen through his work.
While finishing Highschool, architecture was a 6 hour weekly subject over a 2 year period of time for Andrijan. He picked this subject, because he wanted to study and become an architect. He was eager to learn more about it and is still interested in it. He bought books, watched informative movies & videos about it, got to know architectual CAD programs and designed a few small project conceptions. After he graduated from Highschool, he went on an internship in a architectual firm. There he learned a lot about the business side of the profession. He disliked it alot.
There was no joy in the process, since Andrijan wanted to design most of the time, therefore he came to the conlussion, that the design-part of an architects profession, is very small. After the internship he started to study architecture and design in Stuttgart. He decided, with all of the previous expierience and the new gained ones, in college, that he does not want to percieve in this direction. Hence he de-registered from the college and began a new path in becoming an artist.
It startet with singing in school as a subject but Andrijan always enjoyed it, even outside of school. Through the years he developed his singing voice and has a good feel for it. All around he sang a few gigs and plans on continueing it.
It startet in 2016 when Andrijan decided that he wanted to play his own songs and therefore, stop singing to playback tracks. His idol was Ray Charles and the first song he learned for the Piano was Hit the road Jack, followed by What I’d Say and Hard times.
There is alot to say about the journey of Andrijan playing guitar. From practice at home, to solo gigs and then to his own first band. There has been a lot of up’s and down’s for him in the meantime, since he idealized alot and always wanted more, this went so far that he burned out and paused playing the guitar for quite a while. He played at various bars and restaurants and after a while he got to know a bass player, another guitarist and a drummer. The band was a classical rock n’ roll band. Therefore it did not last longer than half a year. They had one gig and could never decide on a name. After they parted ways Andrijan played a few small gigs until he burned out. After that he wanted to quit the Guitar for good, since in his eyes, it did not bring him any good. About 2 years passed since his last perfomance. Tho he plans to do future gigs and maybe even start another band but not under the same conditions as last time.
