Antonín Vojtek

"My dilligence went in the direction of making myself so visible as an artist that I was called into the offices of what we called the castle, if you understand. Castle, that was the offices. In the castle lived the director and the deputies and all these financial clerks and all these different institutions, I don't know what all, and they called me in there and said, 'If you're going to make banners and canvas paintings for us, propaganda paintings, you don't have to be employed at us anymore, you're going to be a secret artist.' And I said, 'That's good,' so they found a room where they were mixing the colors for one big hall, so to speak, and they repainted that overnight and I had an office there where I could do the signs, whatever they said, I wrote. That may have also contributed to the twist afterwards." - "What kind of signs were they, for example?" - "Long live the Soviet Union and so on. Everything. I even designed them a sort of construction twenty metres across the garden to here, a construction on the square. They made it. Like a rocket. Maybe I had some fun with it. When they saw that I was like that, they said, 'You must have a big studio.' They even tokk me to Ostrava, at the headquarters. I got to know how they live, these people here, these communists, how they have these stops, where they get drunk, where they eat, where... you understand. The life, how they make their life easier, how they have everything, just unbelievable. It's complicated. One of those, I would say managers, he even took me home. 'Dress up, Tonda.‘ So I thought, 'Okay, what's going to happen?' Surprisingly, 'You're coming with me.' So he took me to a huge villa in Hustopeče, which he had built here, mainly out of the iron he had stolen and bought like this, or I'm sorry, maybe bought cheaply, I don't know. Iron was prevalent there. 'You could paint a picture for me on this wall, but I won't give you any money, you can be happy that I'll give you some higher allowances, rewards.' I said, 'But I want at least the cost of paint.' I said to myself that this is a picture that could cost hundreds of thousands, that I would need at least fifty thousand. 'Well, it's not possible.' And immediately the lawsuits happened, my wife was in court, she worked too. That was drama."

"That was literally a lovely landscape. I went from theKarlovy Vary region to paradise. Meadows, you've seen two pictures now, meadows, pools, sandy paths, willows, so-called head willows, near Lanžhot a wild forest, it stretched past Pálava up to Pohořelice, almost. And exaggerating just a bit, I literally got engaged to that landscape there. I used to spend the night in those grasslands. I say again with exaggeration that maybe the mosquitoes got used to me, they drank my blood and then they left me alone. I found out that I mustn't wave arms, that it would make me sweat more. And then they would get on me, they sucked. So I made friends with them. I knew everything, every inch of that land. So I was saying goodbye to that land when I was there for those two years afterwards... I have two pictures left, I sold everything off."