Ordinarities

At Karas Gallery, I have exhibited works with motifs and topics that have been occupying me for quite some time. They have in common that they depict ordinary, everyday objects and situations. Mugs, pots, cutlery, watering cans, hands, feet, children’s play on a sunny summer day in the sandbox of the park, going for ice cream, walking through the woods… I tried to paint the motifs straightforward and as directly as possible, but visually interesting, concentrating on the clarity and beauty of the large forms present in objects for everyday use.

Also, the situations of encounters between everyday objects and man, i.e. the presentation of human states in certain situations, are artistically interesting to me. So in some paintings, I tried to evoke the nervousness and despair that overwhelms us when we are in the midst of the chaos of an unmade kitchen, standing in front of a pile of scattered and unwashed dishes. In contrast, a cup of warm afternoon coffee or a stroll through the flora of the forest is an attempt to evoke comfort and peace.

I come to the motifs by doing a large number of drawings. When I make a drawing that I think might work in the medium of the painting, I take a large format and get started. Thus, with a few medium-format paintings, the second part of the exhibition consists of a large number of small drawings, which served as a preparation for painting, or which were created spontaneously during the work on the paintings. do not consider most of these drawings to be finished and defined works of art, but I think that they are a necessary part of the artistic whole that I have exhibited. On them, one can see the process of looking for shapes and proportions. Some ideas arose from accidentally overlapping drawings that lay in the clutter of the floor or drawing table. I transferred this method to collage, which is a common and important element of my paintings. As I work, I bring into the painting everything I know in a painterly sense. And that never proves to be enough. Then I paint further, to the point where the painting becomes stronger and smarter than I am until it surprises me. If that surprise is unpleasant, I start over. If pleasant, the painting is done.

Marko Zeman