paintings of David Bartoň

 I loved drawing and painting since I was a small child, but I really started to paint (more or less seriously) ten years ago, in 2002. In that time, I saw paintings made by David Bartoň, moravian painter, and I loved them immediatelly. At most I love what I call his "abstract landscapes", but he paints also fun portraits of his friends and people he saw in pub. The landscapes are so beautiful, bold colours, optimistic, energic paintings. There was a time (in 2002/2003) when I wanted to paint like him. I really tried, haha, but obviously I couldn´t achieve anything similar (maybe later I´ll show you some of my old paintings, so that you know how much I was inspired by him... I almost tried to copy his style :). I love the squares he usually paints the landscapes on, I love his colours, everything. For a long time I´ve kind of forgotten about him, and didn´t see his paintings anywhere... But recently I started to think about my own "painting journey", how I would like to write about my paintings from the beginning, who and what influenced and inspired me, and why did I paint in the first place. I just began to think about all this in my head and thought about writing a post about this on this blog, but I realize this would take me a long time and some research (and also the actual post would be quite long). It will maybe be a while before I manage to write this. But - today I started to make the research, and I found David Bartoň :). And I have to say, after years and years, and after my vision of what I would like to paint changed a lot, I still love his paintings. Today, as I was looking at his work I actually thought about buying one of them, but since I mostly love the big ones, it would be probably expensive :). I can already see the painting on our beautiful grey wall in the living room... Oh well. (My husband told me there is actually a chance it wouldn´t be so expensive, so... :)
Here you can see his other works, I highly recomment clicking through them.

I fell in love with another house...

...and I love it so much I can hardly stand it! :) Oh my, this building is so so so beautiful. I started to like it a long time ago, and made a painting of it already, but then I found out I didn´t take a good photo of the house - a huge part was missing on the photo. It´s almost impossilble to take a photo of this house, as it stands right next to the road (quite busy road), and there´s no place to park the car. But today, thanks to the internet and Google maps, I found great photos of the house. And I want to paint this house for the second time. Well, in fact, I would like to actually buy the whole house, but it´s practically a pallace, so I don´t think this is possible :). (Not that I have enought money for a small house, haha.) I just think it´s so gorgeous.

I love you, want you, need you, baby!

about moving

With my husband, we moved a LOT while studying. At least 10 times in four or five years. It was mostly moving around Prague, from one end of the city to another. For me, this was very stressful: it was hard to find an affordable place, and the moving itself was pretty difficult too. We dragged along all the crazy stuff we had: flowers, heaps of books, clothes, sleeping bags, computers (and a printer, scanner...). It was insane to see how much possesions we had, and that we had to move from one place to another. At first we didn´t have any furniture, so it was a bit easier, as we could carry our belongings in our bags. Traveling with heavy bags on our shoulders, emptying them and then going again. I always thought about divorce, because 90% of the stuff was my husband´s :). But no such luck for me, and there we were, moving and moving again. Sometimes we stayed half a year, sometimes two months. Our longest stay was one year, before we moved where we live now. We lived in strange places: one time we stayed for the holidays in a house that belonged to organisation caring about youngsters. We stayed in one room, the rest was also used by punk bands to do their rehearsals. Once we found a stranger in the shower, which was covered in mud, or we came home to find a running tap while no one was around, sometimes our food was missing... We lived in a tiny room in student dermitory where we shared three toilets and a shower with many many students living on the same floor. There was a hole in the bathroom´s wall, and one night, I sneaked in there with my tempera colors and painted a picture of two divers exploring the hole :). I have so many experiences living in all those places, and I could talk about our "adventures" for hours. There were certainly good and bad times, but the memories are mostly nice. It was nice to live in different places and to explore the neighborhood during long walks. There was always some park nearby and interesting things to see. But I was terribly longing for a real home. To have a kitchen or bathroom only for ourselves is still a huge luxury for me :).
I painted this blue house with windows to our Prague homes. It feels very nostalgic to me, I loved to live in Prague. I plan to make another painting with our previous homes, with the rooms maybe more detailed (we usually only had one room where we slept and worked). I think it´s nice to remember and somehow organise my memories.

to stress or not to stress

That is the question! Since my child was born, I´ve found myself in a strange kind of stress - a nice stress, I would say. Millions of ideas and plans were pouring into my head. It was pretty crazy. Long long time ago there were times when I e. g. didn´t know what to paint. Could you believe that? I was just sitting there and thinking, what the heck should I be painting? Not anymore. I could be working on ten paintings at a time with no problem (and almost I am, in fact :). Of course, when Marie was born, I was not feeling very well, both physically and psychically, plus I was writing my thesis and had the state exams ahead of me... Now that´s all of that gone, I enjoy doing what I want, but often I feel like my head will explode from all the things I would like to do. And sometimes it results in myself sitting, staring in the wall doing nothing, and feeling badly about wasting my time. I wasted so much time in my life already that I don´t want to anymore. But I´m a naturally lazy person, so I guess I can´t be as productive as I would like to be :). I´m sad that things take me very long time to finish. But is it really that bad? Does it really matter if I manage to complete one or five or ten paintings in one year? Or how many clothes or other things I can make? Probably not, as everything has it´s own time, and it´s important to enjoy every day without feeling like I have to accomplish something.
Anyway, yesterday I really wanted to make something very quick and instant. I made a leather bug for Marie, and it was completed in about two hours. Very rewarding :).
Also, I saw a beautiful beautiful blue house in Prague today. I should take a photo, but I´m not used to carrying a camera with me... I should change that :).
We´re attending a wedding in July (my childhood best friend is getting married), and I´m thinking about the right gift! She suggested that I could make them something, which is awesome, but I don´t know what could that be yet. (I could give them a painting! Ha! :)
Have you seen any good films lately? We´ve been to the cinema to see Melancholia (new film by Lars von Trier) and I really liked it. I was amazed by the intro, so artistic.
That´s all from me for now :).

update: I found a picture of the house online! here it is:
(a house in Nekázanka, Prague)

black dress

I finished making this black dress - it took me quite a lot of time to make it. More time than I would like, actually. I guess it´s not a good thing that I want everything to be completed as soon as possible... most things need a lot of time to be finished. It´s similar with painting: I have to learn to make things slowly, be patient, pay attention to details. Sometimes I wonder if there is some point in the things I do and make. Am I doing it right? What´s the use of it all? What if I´m wasting my time on something? With sewing it´s a bit easier, of course, because I like that it´s practical and the result is useful usually. Mostly you also save money when sewing. But, isn´t sewing these dresses such a vain? After all, I don´t have many occasions to wear them... With painting and many other things I do, I´m sometimes quite unsure whether it´s good for something. I hope it is, at least for myself and my friends who like to look at the paintings.
So, here´s my new dress. The fabric is lovely cotton and linen blend. I made this dress while watching the fabulous Love and death by Woody Allen - his funniest film I think. I could quote it all day long. I love everything about this film. "I never want to marry. I just want to divorce." Hahaha! Great film, highly recommended :).