About me

My name is Pavol and I have been painting since I was a child.

But only in recent years this hobby has grown into a real passion. Thinking about the effect of colors, depiction of light, and immersion of some elements in darkness or working with details can absorb me so much that I often stop noticing the time passing by when I stand in front of a canvas.

Through my works, I try to point out the beauty of the human body, nature, its colorfulness, wonders, our smallness, but also our ingenuity. Through others, however, I try to raise the observer from the dust of the mundane and the average in which he moves every day and take him higher, from where the world will seem beautiful and unburdened by shallow difficulties. In other works, I try to confront the observer with darkness, fear, failure, death or an unknown force that he has to resist. At such moment, however, I want to stand by him, hidden in the work, so that I can show him that only in really deep darkness will he notice an inexplicable flash of light that will guide him. I want him to find in my works the strength to continue, not to wait for better conditions, to struggle and not to give up despite an insurmountable obstacle. And I wish that this observer would also become

You.

I wasn't born with a pencil in my hand or under an artistic star. At birth my hands were quite empty, small, with clenched fingers, and perhaps a little clammy and bloody. The decision on what tools to take in my tiny hands was being made during the early years of my life, when, out of curiosity, I grabbed everything within my reach.

Encouraged by my parents, I tried to explore the world through drawing, painting and writing. They showed appreciation for many of my failed works and never ceased to provide me with the energy I needed to keep on creating.

In addition to crayons and pencils, brushes, hard pastels, and inks started to find their way into my hands. It took me a long time to develop a relationship with them and to understand the best way of working with them. And it took me even longer to understand that I would never get along with some of them. That's how brushes, acrylic and oil colors eventually grew close to my heart. I've been working with them for almost a decade now, trying to know them as well as I know my own palm. But I'm finding that it's a lifelong process that I'd struggle to handle without inspiration.

I have often stood in silent amazement in front of the paintings of masters who were able to realistically depict the landscape, to create an impressive atmosphere or to convey emotions to the viewer using the right colors and brushstrokes. Inspired by them, I try to follow a similar path.

After finishing a work, I often feel dissatisfied and think that I could have made the painting better. However, I accept every acknowledgement and justified criticism from people with humility and gratitude. They are valuable because they look at my works in a way that I never could. Differently. Differently from the author.

"So what have you come up with? What is it like?"

"Think of it as a furnace with huge fire and smoke blazing out of it. Pinching smoke that rises far into space. Small and ugly monsters that live in the sewers keep coming to the furnace and keep mending the fire. They throw in everything they can find, just to keep the fire burning. You and I are also mending the fire, even though we may not be realizing it. And apparently, we are not even supposed to. We are not supposed to think that the smoke we breathe is poisoning our lungs, destroying our health, and that when it rains, all that smoke will be washed into the sewers where we live. We are not supposed to think about it, let alone protest against it, because everybody is mending that fire. It's normal and we are supposed to be normal, too."

excerpt from the book