Artist Daiga Krūze is best known to a wider audience for her abstract, larger format paintings. Her compositions are made with free brushstrokes and vivid colour combinations, in which we often find figural images and spatial motifs. The artist has expanded her creative experience at a porcelain painting residency in China, near the historic cradle of porcelain in Jingdezhen. “Triepienu ceļojums” (Brushstroke Journey) is Daiga’s first major exhibition of porcelain painting in Latvia, in which we observe nuanced stylistic transformations as she addresses the new material, i.e. porcelain and painting experiments upon it.

The exhibition of Daiga’s works in the display windows of Riga Porcelain Museum comprises painted porcelain vases done during a visit to China in November 2019, as well as paintings made later in Latvia. The artist has chosen to begin from the very foundations by painting with cobalt, the most traditional pigment used in porcelain painting, on unglazed porcelain. “I employed this painting technique for the first time. I was surprised by the porcelain surface which, without firing, instantly absorbs the paint, so I had to act quickly and decisively,” says Daiga. For several months, she relished painting with traditional Chinese brushes. She learned about changes in colour intensity and how the painting is transformed after firing, surrendering to the brushstroke and intuitively producing compositions through the interplay of form with painting.

Thanks to Daiga’s courage in swapping a canvas for spatial porcelain objects and familiar oil paints for hitherto exotic cobalt, viewers can enjoy these outstanding works at Riga Porcelain Museum. The monochrome paintings reveal delicate brush touches which form layers and conjure an unusual sense of spatiality and landscape. A similar manner can also be observed in Daiga’s paintings, in which seeming abstractions conceal real landscapes, and the brushstroke is like a journey from one painting to the next, and from one porcelain artwork to the next.