Meet the Artist: Alyse Radenovic
Sarah Sussman, Art Magazine: Judaica in the Spotlight. 2019.
Tell us a little bit about yourself and your background.
I grew up in a working-class home filled with an impressive collection of Western and Eastern art in the resort town of Virginia Beach, Virginia. My mother was a Jewish woman from Brooklyn, New York who taught Russian and Spanish. My father was a mathematician who worked as a bookstore proprietor in Norfolk, Virginia. He was from a notable scholarly family in China. My third great-grandfather was the Qing Dynasty political and military leader Zeng Guofan. One of my great-uncles was the distinguished 20th-century Chinese literati painter Chen Shizeng. My grandfather Yu Ta-Wei was a mathematician, WWII general, and R.O.C. defense minister.
In my early adult years I lived in the New York metropolitan area and sold dresses I made at home to local boutiques under the label name Aelisheva, after my Hebrew name Elisheva. I later moved to the Republic of Srpska and partnered with a dressmaker named Sanja Zivka Jovanovic based in Belgrade, Serbia. We continued to work in fashion together after I went back to America.
What inspired you to become an artist?
I always wanted to be a fine artist. I experimented in different media for many years. I made some paintings to be shown with our fashion work, and the response I received was overwhelmingly positive. I was a huge fan of composer Kokan Dimusevski (Dimushevski) from the art music group Leb i Sol. When he personally contacted me in 2009 and asked me to create art for one of his music projects I happily quit my other work and began painting full-time.
What is your favourite item in your current collection?
My favorite recent work is the painting Matan Torah I, number 2018-22.
What was the first artwork you ever sold?
The first dress I sold was slate-gray patchwork pinafore folded and then sewn to shape. It included red, silver, black, and white machine embroidery in motifs that subtly referenced themes from a book called "The Secrets of Hebrew Words" by Benjamin Blech that I had read at a family friend's house. Damien Sarrazin, from the Xuly-Bet store (later called Fragile) on Orchard Street in the Lower East Side of New York, sold it on consignment.
The first painting I sold was a landscape of Krajina.
Which project have you enjoyed working on the most so far?
Artwork for "Colours and Colours" audio-visual concert by Kokan Dimusevski.