Painting – that´s what interested me in the age of 8 years the most. I painted funerals and above-board, I looked forward to every funeral of any citizen of Plzeň. The whole ceremony was very touching for me though I did not understand much of the pastor ´s speech above the coffin. I always longed for providing comfort to the mourners. And if there was a longer time without any funerals, I found a run-over cat or a frozen crow and I prepared their last ceremonial journey.

My parents thought by that time that I was not normal. So no wonder, that I started my painting career with painting of a funeral. It was oil on canvas and it seemed to me that the picture got quite nice. Behind the coffin, many crying women and children were following and I stood at the graveyard wall and played flugelhorn. My mother stroke my head for my creation and within some days, she brought me a book with reproductions of famous painters, which I copied in some moths. The most succeeded ones were hanging for a long time on the wall in my mother´s bedroom. Shortly, I started to think about painting seriously. I travelled every Sunday with a cardboard and colors out into the nature. I imagined I was a famous landscape painter. The painting of the funerals was against the grain of my father. He wanted to make a man of his rather shy son and he started to take me with him to football matches. But never ever could I understand why the men at the tribunes scream so furiously at the men running on the lawn. I never got fond of sport really, just in the same way I never did with my father´s other hobby – electricity.

 

But I could fascinated browse the books about famous painters, while the guys from my class played football. I visited any exhibition available and when I got home, I was always painting something. Then Christmas came, the one I never forget. I got a complete painter´s set. An easel, some already tight canvases, a collection of oil colors in a case, brushes, palettes, turpentine, oils, diluents… It was the most beautiful Christmas present ever. It changed my life immediately.

I was also lucky with my class teacher, Mr. Kuhn, who supported my hobby at the ground school, because he was a painter himself. When he saw my devotion for painting, he sometimes booked a visit for me in some of the ateliers. It was always a festive day for me, when I was able to follow the secrets of the painting technology and ask on and on and on. So my teacher, Mr. Kuhl sort of prepared me by 100% to the admission exam for academy. As I already mentioned, I was 100% convinced of my painting talent. Even in a way that I persuaded my father to allow me to participate at the admission exam for UMPRUM.

I was really beside me with joy. Tidy, flossy and full of expectations I ascended the wide stairway to the school. No naked models could be seen anywhere, only nervous guys just like me a room full of easels. We should paint an old worn-out shoe with shark tongue and nails and torn piece of shoe-string in the holes. When I painted, I completely forgot about the fact that this shoe completely decides on my further fate and also that my mum was nervously tearing a handkerchief at home. I finished my work and I was convinced that I never painted anything as good as this shoe.

But as it sometimes may come – if you are too satisfied with your work, it usually ends by a big fiasco. The life kicked me properly right in a while, when I learned in the silent class room that I have not painted that shoe that good and that I have not been accepted to the first year of studying. The world got all black for me – the young, hurt painter – and the only one thing was waiting for me: to resign to my father´s will and start to learn to become an electrician. The training college was in Cheb and me who figured out being a painter who paints naked models and visits Prague cafés, was at the bottom of my physical strengths.

And this way, my next decision for my life came: I will sing, at least I earn some money for the colors!

I often ask myself a question, into which period I was actually born. I experienced several different regimes, sang for different presidents, which some people still blame me for and they say that I rather should have stay abroad in emigration after 1968 than to sing for communists. Nowadays we live in a more convenient time, I would say. My profession of a singer stills supports me quite good, and thus I can afford to paint what I feel, what fits my visions, feelings and imagination. I don´t have any time press. I only paint, when I´m filled with taste to catch an idea I have. As painter, I´m an autodidact and I relax from the stress of show business with my painting. And because I´m free in painting and I don’t feel any time pressure, I can simply paint Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci, how she went to a café and drank a glass of wine. It´s my free decision and because I don´t intend to offer the painting for sale, I don´t really bother myself much with the fact how the reviewers will accept my work.

Me as a painter, I´m trying to catch a whirl of my imaginations, ideas and dreams in colors. And I find peace of mind in the painting, which I really need. The atelier is my saving island, where I can devote myself to medication and where I calm down my soul with a creating exposure rather than by singing. Other people may go to the church and they don´t have to be too faithful. They just visit an oasis of peace, from which you see the world in a completely different way when you look around.

My paintings seem to live their own lives. Often they travel around the world and some may even get lost out my sight for ever. Every painting is at the same time a document of a chapter of my life. Painting is an advantageous time for inner harmony, where you regenerate what´s inside you, even if you don´t know about it. Our subconsciousness transforms the energy at once and creates strength for new activities.

Colors and again colors – that´s what´s painting is all about. The colors are actually symbols and a painting often says more than thousand words. Painting is a silent poetry and poetry is painting with words. We paint by the eyes of love and we should also be judged by the eyes of love.

How much disappears on the long way from the eye through the arm and fingers into the brush… but sometimes, on contrary I may get a nice surprise and realize how many beautiful things can join along the way.. Egon Schiele has said, that the art can´t be modern, because it´s ancient and forever. Yves Tanguy said, that a picture blooms in front of our eyes and reveals its secrets as it grows. This is what gives me the feeling of perfect freedom. The state of my soul while painting sometimes looks like a play of mind with memories of the future...

 

Photo: Alan Pajer