"ŠARA" is the point where artisanal skill, through the historical context of time, through customs and the entire history of the private lives of the indigenous people of the Pirot region—such a quiet place wrapped in ruggedness, fairytale-like—becomes art. Art that returns to us as the most beautiful boomerang, appearing on the paintings before us. Whether it’s oil on canvas, acrylic on canvas, or digital print on canvas—it’s all deeply personal to Milica Živadinović. Her fantastic visual world is composed of memories of ancestors and motifs from national folklore, as well as impressions from urban daily life. In her paintings, she merges the emotional and poetic, the historical and traditional, in a new and unique way. The patterns in her mind are depicted on the canvas, where each pattern (be it a flower, a pigeon, a bomb, or faith, hope, and love) is first dealt with concretely and magnified, and then again diminished (as in Alice’s Wonderland), scattered across the fundamental, serious foundations of her cosmos, her soaked canvases, whose backgrounds have “consumed” everything that was boiling on them until yesterday. Today, they are ready to receive new motifs, elements, snippets (in this case, patterns)—a whole traditional-artistic-ritual world. Thus, the infinite triumphs again over the finite. All patterns in Milica’s paintings are for us, here and now, patterns of Pirot rugs—traveling patterns of Serbia, but for Milica, they are certainly more than that. For her, they are her tree of life. Her new patterns are wondrously alive, everything is subordinated to them, exalted and loudly silent… Such is Milica’s cosmos, her “all-seeing” eye, cosmic, observing the world in miniature through its kaleidoscope, and thus each enchanting pattern of the Pirot rug has been given a special place. There are many patterns around us and just look: each similarity is beautiful because it immortalizes a cultural and aesthetic fact in the artistic work, yet each difference is even more beautiful because it is Milica’s art, her personal contribution to the beauty of this exalted document called "PIROTSKA ĆILIMSKA ŠARA" (Pirot Rug Pattern).
privatnog života starosedelaca pirotskog kraja – mesta tako tihog i ogrnutog vrletima, bajkovitog – koliko začaranog… i tako doveka, postaje umetnost. Umetnost, koja se kao najlepši bumerang vraća na slikama pred nama. Ulje na platnu, akrilik na platnu, digitalna slika na platnu, svejedno – na svakoj je duboki lični osećaj lepog Milice Živadinović. Fantastični likovni svet sazdan je od sećanja na pretke i motiva iz nacionalnog folklora, ali i utisaka iz urbane svakodnevice. Na njenim slikama spojeno je emotivno i poetsko, istorijsko i tradicionalno, na nov i neponovljiv način. Šare su u njenom umu i ona se na slici svakom šarom (bio to đul, gugutka, bomba, ili vera, nada i ljubav) bavi konkretno i uveličano najpre, a zatim opet svoje šare umanjuje (kao u Alisinoj zemlji čuda), pa ih razbacuje po temeljnim, ozbiljnim osnovama svojih kosmosa, svojih natopljenih platana, čija je pozadina „pojela” sve što je na njima vrilo do juče. Danas su spremne da prime nove: motive, elemente, isečke (u ovom slučaju šare) – čitav jedan tradicionalno-umetničko-ritualni svet. Tako beskonačno opet pobeđuje konačno. Sve šare na Miličinim slikama jesu za nas, sada i ovde šare pirotskih ćilima – putujuće šare Srbije, ali za Milicu su svakako više od toga. Za nju su njeno drvo života. Njene, sada nove šare su čudesno žive, sve je podređeno njima, uzvišenim i glasno tihim…Takav je Miličin kosmos, njeno „svevideće” oko, kosmičko, koje kroz svoj kaleidoskop posmatra svet u malom, pa je i ono dobilo posebno mesto u svakoj zanosnoj šari pirotskog ćilima. Mnogo je šara oko nas i pogledajte samo: svaka identičnost je divna jer je njome jedna kulturološka, estetska činjenica ovekovečena u umetničkom delu, a opet svaka različitost je još divnija jer je to Miličina umetnost, njen lični prilog lepoti ovog uzvišenog dokumenta zvanog
PIROTSKA ĆILIMSKA ŠARA.

Text:Marina Cvetanović, Art Historian