Those who have not yet encountered your quick drawings, paintings, or visual arts may remember the year 2012, when you entered the talent competition and impressed with your quick drawings. What made you think of going there?
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That’s a great question, thank you for it. Until then, I hid my quick drawing from the world a little bit and I walked on the subway and on different streets and I was constantly recording the world around me. Maybe I was drawn to it at such a moment that I thought I knew the old masters whom I consider to be geniuses, and I wanted to get closer to the level of being strongly able to transfer what I saw to paper. So I trained my eye as much as possible. And the best school was to sit in the subway, where people don’t know about you, where they are in their absolute nature.
Then I recorded this, in fact I almost didn’t even look at the paper anymore and just observed and drew like this, they didn’t know about it. I was so incredibly lucky that they could move at any time, change position at any time. They talked, sat, were sad, but they could get off at the next station, so I had maybe one or two minutes to record as many people as possible.
Well, and then I couldn’t think of anything smarter than to transfer it to a larger format and try it in life size. So I practiced it a few times and then I said to myself: hey, I’m going to try it and present this technology directly to the audience in the media.
Beautiful, humble work
But you have a good weapon for that – two schools that made it possible for you. You have a degree in restaurant and animation in Zlín. Did you study the two schools at the same time?
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Yes. I have to say that it was very challenging. I restored during the day, phased the pictures at night… You know, the restoration is absolutely beautiful, humble work, but you fully respect the hand of the old master there, and you cannot apply your artistic expression, your artistic path, which you have perhaps already crystallized, there. So I felt in myself that I needed to burn with my own artistic style, my own artistic hand, so I simply signed up for a creative school.
And on the contrary, the restoration helped a lot, they were very passionate about what I managed to restore during one year at the restoration school, how I proceed and what deep knowledge I have through the art techniques. I was accepted and beyond happy. And I actually combined my two Věrks.
Restaurateurs are a fantastic profession, but we know very little about it. It’s a profession where you really have to be a multi-instrumentalist. What else does a restorer need to be able to do apart from being artistically skilled?
You said it so beautifully. I always said multidisciplinary, but a multi-instrumentalist is a genius. You must be an excellent chemist, you must also master physics. You have to have an excellent command of history, art history, the technologies of the old masters, the technologies of different regions of the world – the Italians worked differently than the French and so on. And then you also have to be able to physically handle old technologies, physically control work with microscopes, slides, sample slides, control how materials work, know their age and how they age together with age, and derive your work from this in the future – how you will work so as not to make the work of other restorers difficult because of your interventions.
Two Verks
In 2019, you had an exhibition in Opava called Unmissable. I understood that you chose models in such a way that you simply really liked someone at some point. This is how I imagine walking up to an unknown man and saying to him: “You know, I would like to paint you.”
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Exactly. In a way, I have the two Věrks in me. One is the kind of extrovert who, when he is passionate about something, works as hard as he can. And then there’s the introvert. Well, but at that moment, when I meet someone who is also on fire for me and I perceive a certain strong energy from him, I also get fired up and I am not at all afraid to come and say: “Hello, I am an artist and mainly a figure painter. I would be very grateful and happy if you would be willing to be my model. I do large-format comic portraits and I would be very happy if I could do your likeness.”
And how does it turn out?
Mostly positively.
I appreciate what others might see as flaws or something terribly ordinary.
I think it is very closely related to something I call the art of seeing. What do those people, those faces, interest you when you look at them, for example, in the subway or on the bus?
You can say that I like everyone. I simply admire every feature and every line I see behind that person. I’m not looking for any first-classness, any likability at all. On the contrary – I appreciate what others might consider flaws or something terribly ordinary; I am very attracted to it and I like it very much.
What does Věrka Vybíralová draw in her diary? How was a book about architecture illustrated for her? How did the hand injury affect her work? And what are optical shortcuts? Listen to the full interview!
