Jan Merta

"My first teacher was my father. My second teacher was Jan Daniel Smetana, at first his name was Jan Smetana, then he was called Jan Daniel Smetana because he needed to distinguish himself from another Smetana in Prague. And then his name was Jan Daniel Michelangelo Smetana, and that was a bit of weird. But that's just for characterization. He was a man who knew psychology, who had tremendous psychic power, so he was able to influence people a lot. I was under his influence for a certain period of time before I had to get out of that situation. He was a person who, of course, introduced me to modern art, i.e. world art, where for him the art ended with Gogh, but at the same time he introduced me to contemporary Czech art, because, for example, Jan Zrzavý was alive. And he introduced me to older artists such as Bohumil Kubišta or Alois Wachsman. And of course it went on to the realists, it went from Jan Preisler, Slavíček to Purkyně, to the Gothic and so on. So this was essential for him. And he was actually, you could say, not directly a fanatic, but he was completely absorbed in this art. So that enthusiasm was decisive for me, another impulse."

"When I was ten years old, I walked with my father past the shop called Books, where books were sold. But these shops also often had some kind of reproduction in the window. And the reproduction just pictured a wheat field by Vincent van Gogh, and that caught my eye. And I was looking through the window, it was a little distorted through the glass, and my father started telling me the story of Vincent at that point. So that was kind of an initiating moment, one of the moments that really affected me. I didn't understand art, so-called modern art. I was ten years old and I had more or less no insight. But it was such a hit. And the other thing that preceded that, of course, was when I was about four or five, I was looking at a book on Baroque art, because my father had a number of books on art. And for I don't know what reason I took a nail and with that nail I scratched the eyes out of a self-portrait by Rembrandt where he was already caught as an old man. And probably that look of his was so suggestive that it affected me and I reacted in this surprising way. And I later used this motif in my adult painting."

"I was born in Šumperk, where I stayed only until I was one year old. And then we moved to Liberec, where my father was ordained as an evangelical minister. My childhood was immensely happy compared to, for example, various other beings, traumatized artists who, for example, spent their childhood in different conditions in a block of flats. I was in a somewhat absurd situation at that time, because the borderlands were being settled by Czechs who either came from outside or came from the interior, often in the houses of displaced Germans. And the rectory where we were located was just the villa of the displaced Germans. So this villa had a beautiful garden in the manner of an English park, with a small pond below, and it was connected with the patch of the forest that extended into Liberec. So, of course, as a child, I had no idea about the drastic processes of the fifties, because I was born in 1952 and at that time these things were still happening, that was the hard beginning of communism. And a year later, just for the record, Stalin died, after I was born, in 1953. And Klement Gottwald was ruling at that time."