Adelė Abrasonytė Beinoravićienė was born in 1914, in a family of ten peasants in the village of Stašiūnai, Jonava district. Her parents’ thirteen-hectare farm was located next to a beautiful forest and the nearby Lake Žeimis. After graduating from elementary school, she worked on her parents’ farm and learned the trade of a seamstress. When she got married, she moved to the village of Milagainiai, where her daughter Milda and son Romas were born. Around 1950, the family moved to Kaunas. Her husband Stasys Beinoravičius worked as a foreman in a factory, she raised her children and sewed women’s clothes privately at home. When the children grew up, after her husband died, she lived in her own house with her son Romas’ family and grandchildren Jūrates and Žilvinas.
At the age of about 67, A. Beinoravićienė stopped sewing. That’s when she began to create paintings, which she kept in her house and sometimes gave to someone as gifts. Relatives knew about her hobby, but were not interested in the paintings and did not seriously appreciate them. After A. Beinoraviciene’s death in 1990, the paintings stored in the house were sheltered by her nephew Vytautas Abrasonis, who lived in Dovainonys, where they remained for more than 30 years. In 2023, thirty-two paintings by Adelė Beinoraviciene were donated to the museum by V. Abrasonis’ daughter Roberta Treinienė.
The self-taught artist’s work is an example of primitive folk art, which is characterized by a unique, simplified presentation of reality, free interpretation of proportions, individual details, which highlight and strengthen the main, most important idea of each painting.
The exhibition features two main themes of A. Beinoraviciene’s paintings – “Memories of the Homeland” and “I Live in the City”, which reflect images of her life, portraits of relatives, favorite writers, historical figures, personality traits – nationality, patriotism, worldview – the struggle between good and evil. When creating her paintings, she used and combined various materials – paints, crushed and uncrushed pebbles, crushed amber, fruit seeds, a cut of a tree or bark, even a fragment of a photograph, which bring her work closer to the paintings of contemporary modern artists.
Her relatives remember Adelė Beinoraviciene’s passion for art: she wrote poems, created paintings, read books, which provided food for her creativity. We believe that she was happy when creating paintings.
The exhibition is open until October 15, at the Lithuanian Ethnographic Museum in the town of Urmininkas, 2nd century.