Bitėnai

Every year Martynas Jankus birthday is celebrated in Bitėnai.

There the Picture Garden under the sky is founded to promote the name of Martynas Jankus. Every year the artists participating in the plain-air leave their pictures painted on big wood shields in the arms of nature.

In 2007 I came to Bitėnai plain-air for the first time and fell in love with the place from the bottom of my heart.

And really, the time spent painting on huge shields was wonderful. As well as the cooperation with the artists Algimantas and Audronė Vorevičiai, the painter Gintaras Kraujelis and with Kęstutis Šiaulyčius , whose charismatic personality in fact doesn’t fit even into the wide meaning of the word “artist”.

But the most important event was still ahead and it overwhelmed us. The finished paintings were ceremoniously presented in Mažoji Lietuva space.

However, the nature did not show much pity on them. After several winters these pictures decayed completely. Maybe this happened because of the paint, or the ground-colour or the variable weather conditions of the first winter.

So four years later all of us again came back to Bitėnai to renew or completely restore our paintings.

Then I understood the Power of Nature, the Great Creator, when we ourselves are Her creations, and I tried to leave space for Her art on wood. As if I asked Her to join my work. So instead of spraying anticorrosive polish on the new picture, I inscribed the wood with bird footprints and left it to moisten and moss. About five years passed already and, I think, it’s high time to go and see what my honourable Co-author managed to create in my picture felt for Her. Is the moss growing? Do birds live in the chambers?

And the time in Bitėnai seems to stop: the centuries-old trees are sighing, the river Nemunas is flowing, circling the Rambynas Hill.

The peace and silence witness Vydūnas spirit.

These are noble, special places where I would like to go again.