The starting stimulus for the participants were paintings from the gallery's collections, which can be found in the permanent exhibition at Masaryk Square 24. These are Josef Čapek's Flower Girl with a stylized elongated female figure and a little girl hiding behind her skirt, then Emil Filla's Still Life and Glass Still Life, which belongs to the top works of Bohumil Kubišta. In it we find a large number of different objects that overlap and connect with the background in various ways.
At the beginning, we looked at these works and talked about the life of their authors, which was not easy at all. It was filled not only with intensive work and creation, which was often not accepted and understood by the public, but also with the pain and suffering associated with the war. These artists gave the Czech art scene a new shape and direction.
After drawing inspiration from the paintings in the exhibition, we started our own creation. In the education room, a still life, composed of four objects, was already waiting for the participants. Dominant here was an orange bowl with apples, whose color nicely complemented the other objects in muted shades of brown and gray. The challenge was to paint this still life in a cubist spirit and break it down into geometric shapes or paint it from different points of view. It was not an easy task at all, but most of the creators coped with it very well. Some painted with pastels, others with tempera colors, depending on which artistic technique is closer to whom. And the resulting works were really successful! The original color scheme of the still life was not left behind either, here everyone adjusted it according to the colors that are close to them. A lot of varied works were created in this way. Some works were even humorously conceived.
During our meeting together, we not only experienced what it is like to be a cubist painter for a while, but we looked at cubism from a completely different side, not through the eyes of the viewer, but through the eyes of the artist.
Veronika Dolanská, May 2023
