When you ask me about my reason to painting and sculpting, I will answer that I do not really know. What I know is that it became my life necessity and that it was caused by Southern Bohemia and the locality of Dubenec near Vodnany, where I was born and lived out my childhood. These influences affected all my living with so many feelings, that I must be putting up with it emotionally somehow. As gifted by nature with some art talent, I do painting and sculpting. Country life in my birthplace is my only inspiration. I do not have abilities of a travelling painter, chasing after popular motifs. I do with that one and only square kilometer around our village, where so much is happening and changing, that it will be giving me inspiration till the end of my life. After all our great painter Vaclav Rabas created his entire work on one square kilometer around his birthplace Krusovice near Rakovnik, too. A man is actually constantly thinking back to his children years, which meant so much for the works of great masters, for example Mikolas Ales, but also Pieter Brueghel or Vaclav Spala.

I need to paint outdoors. Standing with my easel and kart in the middle of the fields, on the edge of a village or on the pond dam, I need to listen to the sounds of home, to smell the ploughed soil and drying weed, to feel the wind blowing from the West and percept the rays of the sun which burns above my head. I need to hear crying of seagulls from the Blatec pond and shouting of children on the frozen pond and to smell the mouldered straw. And again I go back to my childhood, when the autumn country smells of fish and my nostrils are teased with the bitter-flavoured smell of burning potatoe tops. I am observing but also listening, and I can do nothing without these impressions. All the good I have ever done in my work so far was done just under pressure of these moments. I like colours my country is burning with from October till the end of April. I like to crowd the picture area with figures going to the fields or returning home, walking around the village square or sitting on the benches. In my paintings these figures are mostly in motion, because motion is my element. Almost all my small sculptures represent people in some activity, walking, just in motion. Only seldom I portray static figures.

My female stone-pickers, it is about my boyish impressions. They walked the clover and corn sprouts areas and picked stones into baskets. It used to happen in March and April. Strong and cold wind was blowing. They braved heavy baskets and the wind blasts. The air smelled of rain and raw soil and the sky was weighty. I know, those are sensual experiences, which are to be understood with a bit of fantasy. These feelings come from my early years, and my countrymen, who live their lives more soberly will no more than smile benevolently, but I always felt that those pickers are listening to the sounds from the outer space through the March winds. And now yet something about my beloved persons of art. At first, I have always adored Mikolas Ales not only for his true rusticity, but also for his spontaneous and perfect art. Then Pieter Brueghel and Jean Francois Millet for the same qualities. I started my painting with landscape and I much appreciate Antonin Slavicek, Vaclav Rabas, Vaclav Spala and of course Paul Cezanne. As for my small sculptures, quite a long time I was looking for the master, whose work would be thematically similar to my. I had to go 150 years back in the art of sculpture history to find Constantin Meunier, a French Belgian, who, with such a persuasiveness created so great plastic work in his late fifties, inspired with a hard life of the simple working men. Another artist I am attracted to is the founder of the Czech modern art of sculpture Jan Stursa. Today, modern Czech sculptor Otto Gutfreund is the closest to my art feeling.

So this is briefly all I can tell about my work of art. In fact, an artist is not to talk much. Those are another art areas. Painter and sculptor speak by their own means, i.e. means of their art. Their work should be judged from this point of view. I will be pleased if you find in my works at least a bit of what I tried to express.