Artist, writer, and musician Jovan Mihailović passed away on August 1, 2022. This is the eulogy that I wrote for his Celebration of Life later that month. I’m posting this on January 15, 2023, which would have been his 89th birthday. Jovan was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia in 1934 and moved to Chicago in 1971, where he contributed to Chicago’s artistic life for the next 5 decades.
Jovan often said that his first memory as a little boy was when he saw the fall colors for the first time, the swirling brilliance of red and yellow and purple, and that in that moment, he became drunk with beauty and never sobered up since. His family lived near a restaurant where music was performed, and Jovan would climb out onto his balcony to hear it, dangling his legs over the edge precariously so he could get as close as possible to listen, until his parents noticed and whisked him away to safety. When his dad would sing songs, Jovan would sing along, spontaneously improvising harmony parts. His beloved Aunt sang him beautiful melodies from his mother’s home town and brought him to places in the city where people would play traditional music and dance circle dances.
He began learning violin at the age of 6 and fell in love with classical music. As a young man, he played with folklore orchestras, playing with musicians from all over former Yugoslavia and neighboring countries, and traveling to countries in Western Europe to perform. By then, he was also painting and writing award-winning plays that were produced in Yugoslavia. Yearning for a freer artistic environment, he moved to Sweden for several years, where he continued his creative work and exhibited his paintings. After that, he moved to Canada and finally to Chicago in 1971, where he contributed to artistic life in Chicago for most of the next five decades, playing violin in nightclubs, exhibiting artworks, writing novels, and directing plays, among numerous other artistic activities. During that time, Jovan had two beautiful daughters, Rebecca and Dorothy-Jane, and even though the family separated long ago and lives far away, Jovan loved his daughters very deeply in his own way, often dedicating artistic works to them. He would often burst into tears at the mere mention of their names.
I met Jovan in 2013 here in Pilsen at another art gallery that used to be nearby to here, where Jovan had an exhibition. I started attending weekly international jam sessions that the gallery hosted, where Jovan would come and play his violin. I found out that Jovan lived not so far from where I was living on the north side, and he invited me to visit him at his place. His tiny apartment was packed with so many paintings you could barely walk, along with stacks of manuscripts, an impossible number of elephant figurines, and a row of richly decorated violins that looked like antiques from the European Renaissance. Jovan himself seemed like a person from another time. His apartment felt like his throne room, where he would sit and muse about art and philosophy, tell stories from his past, and teach me melodies from Serbia and other Eastern European countries. He probably taught me well over a hundred melodies, which we performed together in harmony, sometimes accompanied by our friend Lucia as a violin trio. The magical way Jovan’s stories interwove with the music he taught to me and Lucia inspired us to establish Chicago Folklore Ensemble as a way to explore project ideas that combine music, storytelling, and oral history.
My friends and I started helping Jovan with various things, bringing him violin supplies, giving him rides to the doctor, fixing his computer, hosting birthday parties for him, and he always expressed his gratitude effusively. In his 80s, Jovan lived all alone, surviving on what little he could scrape together month to month, barely able to get around with his walker. But none of that deterred his prolific creative output. Every night, he would stay up nearly until dawn, often past dawn, painting or writing or working on his violins. Despite his age and the many obstacles he continually faced, he produced more, artistically, than any person I knew. He showed us what is possible in old age. At the same time, he represented a cautionary tale for aging — of the dangers of allowing yourself to become isolated, of failing to maintain important family and community ties, and of losing your sense of agency. But Jovan’s lack of agency in logistical matters was perhaps not so much a personal failure as much as an outgrowth of his brilliant artistic mind, and his corresponding inability to pull himself out of the creative trance in which he persisted.
When Jovan spoke, it was often with a seemingly impossible eloquence, as if poetry simply flowed from his brain. He once described his experience of writing as feeling as if he himself weren’t writing at all but that some spirit was writing through him. He often spoke of the Alchemy of Art, the mysterious connection between the various art forms, how the same feeling or idea can be expressed through painting, through writing, or through music. In his personal spirituality, he identified God with the underlying creative impulse of the universe, which he called the Ceaseless Effort to Be, that mysterious force which connects the beauty of the human body to the beauty of nature to the beauty of a soulful melody, the force behind human desire and human motivation and each individual act of creation.
Jovan endured many hardships in his life — Nazi occupation, postwar hunger, a botched medical procedure that permanently injured his leg, his family’s dispossession under Yugoslav communism, the murder of his only brother by Mafia in Zurich, the death of his mother from an American bomb, and poverty and isolation in the U.S. — but nothing could vanquish his creative spirit, his Ceaseless Effort to Be. Even now that cancer has taken him away from us, his creative spirit endures in the work he left behind and the ongoing creative work of the countless artists in Chicago he inspired — visual artists, musicians, actors, and writers. In many ways big and small, the creativity and beauty that Jovan brought to this world will live on, spreading ever deeper and wider, reproducing itself, and little by little making the world a better place.
