Even a short visit will please

I am trying to look back at the histories and works of three painters, who I came to meet in Bohemia. Karel Šlenger from Chomutice near Jičín, Karel Valter from Tábor and Vladimír Komárek from Slaná near Semily. I am searching their pasts for some hints for my future. How can I combine a painter’s dream of the endless quest for creative truth with the reality of life, and personal responsibility for one’s close relatives and friends? How not to lose a live contact with the viewers, how to be neither too gratifying nor conceited? If I could actually choose, I’d borrow Vladimír Komárek‘s ascetic artistic expression and ability to describe the finest movements of a non-heroic human soul. I have Karel Šlenger in mind when I feel that I lack the true painter’s obsession and personal responsibility for the gravest ethical problems of humankind.
I’d like to have the same wrinkled painter’s face as Karel Valter has, observing the beautiful landscape in front of him with fascination. I would also like to gradually achieve that state, perhaps as late as at the age of ninety, of painting in an unpredictable and inimitable way, to achieve the mastery of a child painting. It was precisely Karel Valter who asked me at my first exhibition in Tábor in 1995 how old I was. When he heard the rather proud, „I’m already fifty,“ he beamed at me, saying, „Oh, fifty?“ and looking at my pictures, he added, „It’s perfect for a start.“ The sense that I’m at the beginning has not left me, despite the fact that I’m already sixty. I always begin feeling uncertain, despairing from time to time, but also experiencing the excitement of discoveries in painting, something that was neither planned nor calculated, the very joy of painting. As the painters do not really die, I walk along a path side by side with them.