My grandmother died when I was 12 years old. By the end of her life she was in constant pain and due to losing both her legs to diabetes, was totally incapacitated. Nevertheless, I can remember her bright outlook, which reflected a coming to terms with her fate. And I also remember her unbelievably smudged eyeglasses and her fingertips hardened by the glue she used to attach satin flowers onto paper. But during the last ten years of her life what really changed a discontented and unkempt old woman into a kind and gentle soul was her creative output.
As a young mother, Anna’s energies centered on her three children who were her entire life. But when they were grown and no longer needed her parenting, her reason for living vanished. She felt incomplete. As my father recalled, dealing with her distress was, to put it mildly, difficult. So together with his older brother, Slava, they came up with a practical idea. In the attic (or the cellar, I never can remember which),they found some old panels covered with oil paintings that Anna had painted when she was single. And because back then Slava was studying medicine and my father was preparing to be a sculptor, they decided to prescribe something like art therapy for their mother. It was a success. Anna began to paint. At first she drew realistic flowers, although they already began showing fantastic elements. Realism, however, soon became unsatisfying to her. Her imagination suddenly streamed forth like an uncontrollable geyser. Anna arose before dawn, before the family awoke, and while listening to music, she created powerful shapes that were the forerunners of her biomorphic apparitions. A thousand more details were added throughout the day each of which yielded an independent design.
This creative flood began in 1960 when Anna was 52 years old; and soon after she began using pastels. This allowed for illuminated surfaces which became distinctive; and also brought religious elements into her drawings. Pastels primarily supplemented ink details which she later replaced with ballpoint pens. And it is these drawings from this period, the end of the 1960s, that appear in this exhibit. The previous massive shapes were rather delicate, star-like flowerings that began to resemble precise drawings of a spiritual nature. Anna often is classified as a spiritualist even though she was never a member of any spiritual movement. In the artistic medium she is connected by automatism and artistic shapes. Another category into which Anna is included is Art Brut---an art form that is wholly spontaneous, rising from urgent inner necessity that refuses to resemble anything. Within this category, fashioned by Jean Dubuffet, a French artist and theoretician, Anna’s work has appeared in world-famous museums that specialize in this art form.
Terezie Zemankova