I was born half an hour later than my
brother Viktor, in the summer of 1945 in Chelyabinsk, where my Jewish family
fled from Hitler. Chelyabinsk is situated on the border between Europe and
Asia, beyond, there is Siberia.
I am the son of ordinary people, and
therefore it is strange that since my early childhood I have been painting.
My childhood photos reveal a fairly
pleasant boy, but without any signs of excessive intelligence.
These signs may not have appeared later,
either, nevertheless I have been drawing and painting all my life. At the age
of twenty-four I finished my studies of architecture. At the age of forty-five
I managed to get rid of the megalomania which this beautiful profession brings
with it. Since then I have done nothing but painting. My parents, who had been
proud of me being an architect, are dead by now, so there is nobody to reproach
me for my present insecure vocation.
As a boy I perceived works of art in
museums and galleries as natural phenomena, as day and night, the sun and the
moon, trees, rocks, and sand in my palms.
All the most beautiful paintings seem to
have already been created in the course of the past centuries. Still, more and
more crazy people are being born to shyly try to climb the unattainable heights
of art.
Now, in the rare moments of my creative
success I look at what I had painted at that time as an enchanted spectator
observing a work of unknown artist for the first time. And if there is a vanity
of the artist, it co-exists with the vanity of the spectator who has found his
own artist.
My paintings live their own independent
life. By a strange coincidence they found themselves in the places where my
Jewish ancestros had lived before they made their pilgrimage from Central
Europe to the Ukraine and Russia. The exhibitions in Medzilaborce, Prešov,
Bratislava, Vienna, Jičín, and finally in the Jewish Museum in Prague
indirectly confirm our family legend of our Czech roots.
My perception of the air, the sky, houses
and people in the Czech Republic and in Slovakia - that is the feeling of
knowing the places and rejoicing from the return.
