There is an old story — old enough that Pliny the Elder recorded it in the first century AD. A young shepherd and a milkmaid fall in love. The problem is practical: he has to take the sheep out to graze and is sometimes gone for a week or more. To cope with his absence, she takes a piece of charcoal and carefully traces the outline of his shadow against the side of a tomb. And so, the first painting was made.
Jean-Baptiste Regnault, The Origin of Painting: Dibutades Tracing the Portrait of a Shepherd, 1785, oil on canvas, 120 x 140 cm, Musée National du Château, Versailles (Wikimedia Commons)
In other words: art was born out of the fear of forgetting.
Not out of boredom, not out of status — out of the need to hold onto something fleeting. One particular person wanted proof that someone had been there. The story applies just as well today.
In Art Against Despair (Phaidon Press, 2022.), Alain de Botton returns to this story as the starting point for a broader question: if art was always, from the very beginning, a response to loss, what is it that’s at risk of being forgotten today, and what does art help us keep?
The reasons for living we forget to remember
De Botton writes plainly, without academic jargon: art exists to remind us of the reasons life is worth living. In good times, we know those reasons intuitively — we don’t need to go looking for them. But in those other moments, when getting out of bed in the morning feels like an achievement, when routine drains the world of color, and when we forget — and that’s the key word, forget — why we ever cared about spring, or the sea, or laughing, something interesting happens.
Good art reminds us. And it does so with a precision that language rarely manages. Hence the cliché “a picture is worth a thousand words”.
This doesn’t mean you need to stand in front of a painting every morning and expect it to fix anything, either for you personally or on a global scale. The point is something bolder: that certain works have the ability to remind us — completely unexpectedly, in the middle of random moments — of something we knew deep down and had simply forgotten.
What artists hold onto
When I think about how this idea lives in actual work, I immediately think of some of the artists we represent in the DLightful Gallery. I mention them because they’re close at hand and because I think their work deserves the spotlight. But I also mention them because, if you’re reading this as an artist, you might find yourself asking: what do I hold onto? What do I want to remind the people who look at my work of?
Jelena Martinović, Ascent 4, 2024
Jelena Martinović doesn’t paint nature the way we picture it when we say “landscape” — no scenic postcards, no dramatic mountain peaks. She draws from direct, physical experience — forests, rivers, mountains — which for her are inseparable from her inner self. (It’s no coincidence that, in 2007, she was part of the first Croatian women’s Himalayan expedition to Cho Oyu — 8,201 meters.) In her works, a combination of acrylic and paper collage, nature is neither idyllic nor dramatic. It simply is. And looking at these works, something in you becomes equally as present as the traces of nature that she depicts. And this is exactly what slips from us so easily. We’re buried in our phones, focused on things that are, at the end of the day, entirely irrelevant. We’re not present. And in that process, everything that actually matters passes us by.
Stanko Ivanković goes in an entirely different direction. His series The Darkness of the Museum grew out of his experience working at the Art Gallery of Dubrovnik — out of the hours he spent alone with the works after closing time, once the doors were locked and the lights went out. And then something strange happens: objects that had clear, fixed shapes during the day — paintings, sculptures, ordinary museum inventory — become something else entirely in the silence and dark. Shadows deepen, forms start to blur and bleed into one another. Looking at his works, we stop being certain what they are and start asking more interesting questions: what does this work actually represent? Ivanković captures this with a quiet precision — as an observation, not a provocation: things have a double life, and we mostly miss it because we’re not there when the shift happens. His works draw our attention to the fact that what we see is only one layer. That there’s something underneath — in objects, in spaces, in ourselves and the people around us.
Tea Morić Šitum, Intuition, 2023
Tea Morić Šitum works somewhere in between — between figuration and abstraction, between what we recognize and what keeps eluding us. Her paintings, like the works in the Intuition series or the recent exhibition The Methodology of Intuition, capture what we know before we can put it into words. We’ve all experienced it: knowing something without knowing where that knowledge comes from. The body — or maybe intuition — understands before the mind does. Tea doesn’t describe this; she paints it. And in doing so, she gives us back confidence in our own knowledge and intuition.
Dražen Pejković, Work no. 24, 2020/2021
Dražen Pejković asks a question that rarely gets said out loud: whose are we? His Totems — monumental mixed-media sculptures, some reaching 220 centimeters, which had a major solo exhibition on Hvar last season — do what totem poles have always done: they mark identity, preserve collective memory, tie the living to what came before them. Only Pejković’s totems are contemporary, and they address these questions to us, now — at a moment when we’re convinced we’re free, individual, unattached. And in fact, we’ve also convinced ourselves we have no inheritance. Or that we don’t need one.
The context we’re missing
De Botton offers a comparison I keep coming back to. He writes about the mihrab — the prayer niche in a mosque, always richly decorated, always facing Mecca, always the most beautiful part of the interior. Its entire architecture exists to tell the visitor: here. This matters. Pay attention here.
If anything is missing from our society, it’s the ability to direct and hold attention. The advertising industry spends enormous resources making sure we remember a brand of yoghurt. Nobody spends anywhere near the same amount of time or effort on helping us remember things that actually matter.
When we treat art as a tool for returning our attention to what’s important, it can centre us. Looking carefully and consciously at a single work will remind us that compassion is rare and valuable, that sometimes we don’t need to do anything except be present, observe, listen — to ourselves and to others. Focus is something we’re genuinely short of. And when we recover it, even briefly, we can move beyond our usual mental limits.
Art, at its most ambitious, does exactly this — it puts a frame around what’s undervalued but which we know, deep down, matters. It reminds us of what we’ve committed to, at least in theory: to ourselves, to others, to the life we’re actually living.
Why I’m writing this
Not as a philosophical exercise — though that’s always welcome.
I’m writing because I work with artists and gallerists who face the same question every day, just framed a little more practically: how do you explain to someone who “isn’t into art” why they need it?
The answer isn’t in market data — though that’s not irrelevant either. It lies in something every good artist, gallerist, art historian already knows intuitively, but sometimes needs help articulating outward. Every good work holds onto something. Returns something. Reminds you of something.
The question is: what? For whom? And why now?
When you know the answers to those questions — for your own work or for the work of your artists — you have a story that’s neither a sales pitch nor sentimental. You have a story that’s honest.
If you’re struggling to tell that story, get in touch.
Yours,
Dora