The son of a Montenegrin Orthodox priest living in Macedonia, Vojislav Jakic was three years old when his family moved to Despotovac, a small village in Serbia. His older sister died from diphtheria and his younger brother from scarlet fever. Vojislav Jakic did not fit in at school, probably because of his father’s profession, frowned upon by the communist authorities, but also because of his Montenegrin origins. Good at drawing, many villagers asked him to draw the portrait of their deceased based on their ID photos. In 1952, he moved to Belgrade to take courses in drawing and sculpture. Back in Despotovac in 1957, he married five years later, but the marriage did not last and he returned to live with his mother. He started to paint again around 1969, then moved to large-format drawings created with ballpoint pen, pastel or gouache, evoking memories of his own life, his obsession with death, his reflections on art, his suffering. In his works abstraction blends with graphic signs and writing.