Before the bomb that landed in his bedroom, before the months of makeshift shelter in abandoned buildings and the furtive trips outside to wait in lines for jugs of water - before his city was transformed by sniper fire and dying and the fear of dying - Nedzad Pasalic was an artist.
He favored intricate pen and ink drawings of the Bosnian countryside outside his hometown of Mostar: the lush vineyards and gnarled tree trunks and old bridges his town was famous for. But that was when Mostar was a picturesque city along the Neretva River instead of a city whose river separated the "Muslim side" from the "Croatian side."Pasalic fled Mostar last summer with his wife, two young sons and mother-in-law, carrying a bag of clothing and a bundle of his drawings. They arrived in Salt Lake City in August, with the help of the International Rescue Committee.
Home now is a two-bedroom apartment in "Little Bosnia," the name that Salt Lake's Bosnian community has given to an area near Edison Elementary School on Salt Lake's west side.
In the tiny living room on Foss Street, Pasalic brings out a pile of drawings that reveal how much the war has changed not only his life but his art.
Interspersed among the old drawings of vineyards and cabbages and countryside are the newer drawings. These are the ones that document Mostar's nightmare.
There is sketch after sketch of buildings ripped open by bombs, a few of them buildings the Pasalices once lived in. There is a sketch of the bedroom of their original apartment, the bed covered with glass after a grenade exploded through the window.
Pasalic's wife, Jelena, had been napping with her children in the bed just seconds before the explosion. It was "mother's intuition," she says, that made her suddenly move the children to the next room.
The family moved to an apartment on another floor after that. Three months later, the apartment building was hit again, this time catching fire. Without a ready supply of water, residents had to watch their building burn.
The Pasalices moved eight times, each time trying to make abandoned rooms into homes. They lived for a short time in an old cafe, memorable for its filthiness. Of course there were no cleaning supplies, and finding water was risky business.
To search for water meant leaving the relative safety of a building and venturing into the streets, unprotected. It meant running through the streets, pushing a wheelbarrow full of water cans and jugs, then waiting for hours in line at the water truck, then running home, dodging bullets.
It was Pasalic's daily forays for water that led him, with a sketchbook under his arm, through streets that became his new landscapes. It was also on these trips that Pasalic saw men and mothers and children felled by sniper fire as they waited in line for water or beans, or simply walked to a neighbor's house to bake bread.
As an art form, Pasalic came to understand, war is realism and surrealism mixed on the same canvas.
So, as the months have passed since Pasalic left Mostar, there has been another change in his art. Where he once simply documented the war's fallen bridges and lines of hungry people, now he has added an emotional, dreamlike layer. Now there are screaming faces oozing out of explosions of paint. Now there are pictures of the Neretva River stained with red.
The Pasalices left Mostar not only because it was a harrowing place to raise their sons but because Yelena is Croatian and "Pasha" is Muslim. While once in Mostar such unions were commonplace (Mostar, in fact, had more mixed marriages than any city in Bosnia), the Pasalices knew that nothing is that simple anymore.
In Bosnia, Jelena had worked as an economist. Pasha was an art professor and had been a graphic designer at Mostar's newspaper, Sloboda. In Mostar, Pasha had a studio of his own. Now, in the little apartment on Foss Street, he draws on the kitchen table when the children have gone to bed.
He hopes to find work here as an artist. In the meantime he will have an exhibition of his drawings at the Art Access Gallery Jan. 15 through 26. Among the drawings on display will be those that he once stored in a garage in Mostar after the family's first apartment burned.
Look at them closely and you'll see how shrapnel can fly through a garage door; how war, not content to simply create awful memories, can mar the old ones as well.
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ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Exhibition opens Jan. 15
"Images of Mostar: A Bosnia artist documents the destruction of his ancient home" will feature drawings and sketches of Nedzad Pasalic at Art Access Gallery Jan. 15 through 26. There will be a reception on Friday, Jan. 19, 6 to 9 p.m., during the Salt Lake Gallery Association's January Gallery Stroll. The reception will also feature food prepared by Salt Lake's Bosnia community. Art Access Gallery, 339 W. Pierpont, has donated space for the exhibition.