ARS POETICA

 

What should I do now? I often ask myself, and I used to ask myself as a child, when I could not ride my bike on the street or play football with my friends in front of the house, in the middle of Salgótarján, in the shining concrete valley between the mountains. This city was new, it felt modern, especially compared to my grandparents’ village house. This duality was in me and perhaps remained later, the connection between old and new, the feeling of progress from one place to another.

 

I loved books about religions, people’s statements about something higher. I was looking for what could be that did not depend on where you were born, who your relatives and friends were, what your opportunities or physical abilities were. I was surrounded by images since I was a child. I felt this mostly because of the atelier, my mother’s photography studio. This was the special place, where I first encountered the birth of images, where prints of people and faces were made on paper, developed with a chemical secret in a darkroom. The black and white photos were from another world, deprived of colour, yet they had some special power. Reality appeared before me transformed.

 

This happened in my drawings too, since I did not have any drawing skills at first, I enjoyed the freedom of the lines that the pencil in my hand leaves a mark on the paper, and I can control it. It is always just a game. Humorous scenes that you could have fun with and laugh at and share the pictures with others, the figures of grotesque figures who can do anything on paper. Giving drawings to my parents and friends as gifts was also an important feeling, learning the joy of giving. And of course the feeling of creation, something being made by my hands, of which I am an important participant. I think these gave me this passion, the motivation to continue.

 

Although art surrounded me, in books, poems, pictures, music, films, their presence was so obvious that I did not even think about it. The artworks in Christmas and birthday books, old painters’ albums, and museum albums just stared back at me silently from the pages. It never occurred to me that someone could do this in the world, dedicating their time to it as an adult.

I was looking for ways to use this love of drawing, and that’s how I found the opportunity of architecture high school, and then, as a direct consequence, college. I obtained a good profession from these schools, but something interesting also happened. I did not start practicing my profession at the drawing board. I was more attracted by the freedom, the experience of life, the perspective of creation, how something develops from dusty earth into a building. That is how I settled into construction and learned how to realize architecture. In fact, I felt this more for myself.

 

I did not want to draw someone else’s ideas, I wanted to build a living space from a drawing, it was a very exciting task for me.

Creativity became my everyday companion, because it was my most important support when dealing with continuous problems.

Yet, something was missing: the sensation of playing. Although it was a pleasure to see the buildings developing day by day and the completed final result, this was still different.

I started attending a drawing school to revive the kind of play that permeated my entire childhood. Although I drew brilliantly as an architect, I still had to get acquainted with the uniqueness of different drawing techniques, now with the precise representation of something. But in the way I like it, the way I want to show them.

After a while, looking at my drawings, my teacher directed me towards painting, which, by incorporating colours into the work, opened up a new opportunity for me. I began to enjoy the colourful world. In the case of photographs, I still prefer  black and white, because it separates the image from reality, puts the subject in a different dimension. But in paintings, changing colours, using them freely, and dosing them according to feeling are what take me away from reality, giving both the creator and the viewer the opportunity to experience free feelings and associations. As the viewer’s importance has returned indeed.

Sharing inner feelings became stronger and stronger. sharing with another person how I experience a moment in life, what I see in it, making them feel the kind of sweet pain and agonizing joy, how the feeling of being beats inside me and transforming all this into images! This became a beautiful, free, creative process for me.

 

At the age of thirty-four, I was mature enough to let go of my studied profession and give myself a few years to see what I could achieve with this task.

Of course, I lacked professional knowledge, knowledge of materials, and the general knowledge of what it means to be a painter. I looked for and found a master in the person of András Berkes, whose studio I studied at for two years. I sought him out by seeing his colours and paintings, and my feelings in this direction worked great with him, as they have since with many of my painter friends, whom I have met through their paintings. With my master, I was able to develop not only my professional knowledge of painting, but also my artistic and philosophical knowledge. In my home studio, I continued painting the studios and searching for my own painterly world. At that time, it was still incomprehensible to me how artists could create their own visual world, recognizable at first glance, and exist in it. To find it, I had to paint many, many studies, many spoiled, bad pictures with full enthusiasm, read the lives of my beloved painters, copy the work of so many masters, spending countless hours looking at a picture, contemplating where it might be continued. It took time to decide, knowing all this, what I wanted to show in a painting and how.

 

Then I finally found a kind of stylization that made my figures unique. The power of colours contributed to the effect, enhancing my intentions. I followed this path and painted the first few hundred pieces of my paintings, mainly in oil technique. From this period of my life, which I painted between 2012 and 2017, I published my first collection album in 2017.

 

The need for freedom and adventure pushed me further on my path, I was increasingly excited by the concept of contemporary art, although instead of Western conceptual art, the Eastern concept remained more important to me, which also provides aesthetic pleasure for the enjoyment of the work and also carries within it an individual image representation detached from isms, dealing with the personal experiences of the people of the time and the topic of social issues. Using the rich material possibilities of the art market, many different paths emerge in painting. Working in artist colonies provided the opportunity to get to know these and encounter individual artistic paths. Perhaps the most important of these is the Ludvig International Symposium, to which I have been invited every year since 2012. Here I can work with older generation masters who already have a lifetime of painting behind them. I have learned a lot of new things from them professionally over the years, which have all opened further doors for me. Of course, like anyone who is constantly involved in art, I have developed my own working methods and editing approaches, which is also reflected in the specific and unique visual world of the images I produce.

 

Since 2018, I have been practicing a new painting routine and the following things have led me to this. When creating my previous paintings, I made many sketches, drew the composition and found and edited one colour after another. Although the specific stylization of the forms and the choice of colours according to the feeling often brought good results, the painting process itself was sometimes slow and cumbersome. I wanted the whole painting process to become a kind of flow and the pictures to convey this freshness, along with the momentum of the movements. Since I had already started working with acrylics, this gave me the opportunity to apply colours, spots, lines, and all this layer by layer without drawing the figures I wanted to paint. In this way, I paint a very free picture, based on gestures and the friendship with the material, which I basically end up with as an abstract painting. I invent the final composition for this independent picture, with own proportions, which I paint using oil technique. Even if I cover certain parts of the basic picture that works on its own, its own rules remain and this remains noticeable even when the figurative layer is added to the canvas. In this way, I gained the joy of painting the picture and could further enhance the freshness of the final creation, show the expression of my inner world with gestures and the vitality of the desired model.

 

The themes I have used over the years are connected to my own person, memories, shapes, faces, imaginations, often impressions arising from film effects, which are connected to the figures of actors. The Balaton series of 2021 was important, in which I first used the photo transfer technique. I glued the pigment of black and white photos of the villas on Lake Balaton onto the clean canvas and created the free associations on it.

I painted these pictures full of life, they have something to say from one person, speaking from one person to another. The age and the human existence in which we all spend our time give each of us a specific reading, but somewhere these experiences resonate, are the sounds of the same music.

Thus these works remain the imprints of one and all of us.