Bronė Mingilaitė-Uogintienė: išplėšusi trumpas žydėjimo akimirkas

LTDailininkė Bronė Mingilaitė-Uogintienė (pokariu buvo rašoma ir Mingėlaitė, 1919–1983) visų pirma žinoma ir vertinama kaip tapytoja, nors jai teko dirbti ir kituose baruose. Jaunystėje sukūrė dekoracijų lėlių teatro spektakliams, 8-ajame dešimtmetyje – kostiumus Nikolajaus Gogolio „Revizoriui“, režisuotam Juozo Miltinio, iliustravo knygas. Yra nutapiusi ir peizažų, ir teminių kompozijų, bet svarbiausia menininkės raiškos erdvė, atitikusi talento prigimtį ir tapusi jos vizitine kortele, tai – portretai ir natiurmortai [p. 134].

ENThe artist Bronė Mingilaitė-Uogintienė (1919–1983) won her acclaim primarily as a painter, though she tried her hand in other arts too. As a young artist she created stage-sets for puppet theatre productions, in the 1970s she designed costumes for Gogol‘s The Government Inspector directed by Juozas Miltinis. She produced landscapes and figure compositions, but portraits and still lifes corresponded best to the nature of her talent and branded her as an artist. After the war Mingilaitė-Uogintienė taught for a short while at the Academy of Arts, but soon became ‘a free artist’ no matter how paradoxical this sounds when talking of people in an occupied country. She used the first opportunity to dedicate herself completely to painting and defended her artistic freedom in the way she deemed acceptable. Portraits and still lifes as the genre enabled the painter to evade the trap of socialist realism, but, on the other hand, marginalized her as an artist. But the choice of the ‘chamber’ genre, isolation from social theme, made it possible to her to realize her calling as a talented colourist.Her bright paintings, also on a decorative side, adorned public buildings and private homes, they recompensed for the drabness of Soviet days and embodied a vision of a more beautiful and ornate life. The artist‘s handling of colour was changing with time: she set out with a tendency towards sombre colours, but in her elder years came to like bright pallete and used to apply paints directly on canvas. Mingilaitė-Uogintienė created a home attracting culture figures of the time and was always surrounded by people. She was as married to a painter too, Bronius Uogintas. Yet she managed not to surrender the necessary solitude of a creator, to live her secret inner life, charged with a perceptable, though hardly translatable into words, drama.