Lucie Raškovová You don't have to unscrew the lid, there is a hole ...
Lucie Raškovová - graphic artist, illustrator, author of texts and assistant professor at the Department of Graphics of the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague celebrated her anniversary with an exhibition. Together with the painter and graphic artist Karel Haloun, she prepared an anthology of her previous work (1997-2020) and presented it in the Gallery Hollar. The gallery and association bear the name of a Czech Baroque graphic artist, who is also famous for capturing London for later generations shortly before the great fire. Thanks to Václav Hollar, we know what the metropolis looked like as a whole before 1666, perhaps even the character of the places he lived. In Lucie Raškovová's exhibition, I actually find a similar intention.
Lucie R. was born in Prague and has since then lived ten minutes from the Anděl metro station. “I go this way every day. Sometimes twice. I circle the city like a moth around a light with the dim hope that it makes sense,” she writes in her book "Meeting an Angel". It is a look back to the time when the Anděl metro station was called the Moskevská. Then the revolution took place, and two years later, in her own words, “a country bumpkin” joined Professor Šalamoun at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague, got married, had a baby, and lost her brother and mother.
Raškovová treats the time and place, but in a different way, in the “colour print” idyll” of her graphic cycles “Sun 20:00”. On Sunday evening at eight o’clock in Czechoslovakia, they would broadcast television series. The screenplays of the fates of contemporary comrade heroes and heroines, their loves and other complications of a banal life now seem ridiculous, even in the way they pretended to be real, for they used quality actors. From the distance of a seriously different time, Raškovová contemplates the essence of their splendour from that time. She continues to work on the cycle. In diary entries from holiday stays, she once again captures the perception of how a short stay, even against an exotic backdrop, makes our thinking and behaviour seem petty. The path to self-knowledge, which comes first and foremost, is not a holiday paradise.
The exhibition features cycles of graphic sheets, book illustrations, posters and samples from diaries. The exhibits are supplemented by the author's comments, reviews, etc. Lucie Raškovová enjoys established graphic techniques but prefers to experiment even more. “Details are processed with an admirable degree of direct abstracting of the seen reality,” wrote Adriena Šimotová in a review of Raškovová's diploma thesis. Fewer lines, but the enchantment remained. Jan Rous and Jiří Šalamoun also reflect on the work of Lucie Raškovová in the texts.
In October, a mental health day is commemorated, and not only in Bohnice. It has been shown that observing birds is beneficial to humans. Lucie Raškovová draws attention to this experience in the cycle “Birds”, where she captures in an unusual way our feathered friends’ relationship to humans. The line of architectural plans, map coordinates, or the monthly calendar intertwines with the rich autumn-toned colours of a woodpecker, a goldfinch, a blue tit and a magpie. Observing these images is beneficial. Probably much like the experience that L. R. passes on through her teaching, which she conveys in the accompanying text, and which is referred to in the title of the exhibition: “You don't have to unscrew the lid, there is a hole in it”.
Pavlína Bartoňová
Almost twenty-five years ago, after graduating as a teaching assistant in the basics of graphic technique and gravure printing, I looked forward to long discussions with my students over emerging graphic sheets about the niceties of the graphic craft, the lone fate of graphic art. I imagined moments of shared joy from searching and finding what can only be experienced when working together. Over time, I discovered how rare such conversations are, and a few students who possessed a similar disposition to myself became my friends. When I tried to summarize my many years of pedagogical work into a single unquestionable sentence, a sort of professional credo, I could not come up with anything fundamental. The sentence kept crawling on my tongue, You don't have to unscrew the lid, there is a hole in it, which I use most often in the pedagogical process, because students usually don't notice it on the cap of the thinner bottle. So it became somehow "unconsciously" the name of this exhibition. In a figurative sense, however, it also means that I do not only want to present representative excerpts from my work so far, but I would also like to show some graphic techniques to which the need for improvisation led me, and at other times the sudden discovery that I’ve been overlooking something absolutely obvious for a long time or the “mere” curiosity to see what happens when… The joy of work, rediscovering procedures forgotten over time, as well as the fact that incorporating new materials into old techniques is fun and exciting. If I try to instil in my students the basic rules and technological procedures of the discipline, I must logically first test for myself what happens if I use tools, printing pressure or material differently than usual. But I need to find this out primarily from my own compulsive need to push the boundaries of the rules. If I try to break them, I must first experience them and only then look for answers to the consequences of not conforming to them, which now and then leads to surprising conclusions. And not only that, they also lead to the joy of adventurous discoveries that could not have occurred without respect and humility for the craft.
Lucie Raškovová
I was there
Lucie Raškovová is a graphic artist, illustrator, artist and author of texts, both recorded and belletristic. Thirty years ago, we came to the Prague Academy of Arts in Prague shortly after one another, I as a teacher of art history and aesthetics, she as a student of Jiří Šalamoun's illustration and graphics studio. Thus I can state: I was there. Our meetings as part of the seminars soon grew into Friday meetings over tea and books, first professional, then popular, important and ephemeral. Even after she finished her studies, we did not stop seeing each other. In addition to library books, we found a common interest used books, Baroque operas and roses.
Jiří Šalamoun focused the work of his students, not only Lucie’s, on books and graphics. (Her interest in graphic techniques eventually led her to the position of a teacher of traditional graphic techniques, which she still holds today.) However, her studies were preceded by somewhat unusual professions. She was employed first as a racehorse keeper and then as a computer centre operator. Thanks to the first occupation, horses sometimes appear in her graphics as dreamlike phantoms. This, however, is not unique to Lucie. Let us recall, for instance, a similar relationship to horses by another Czech graphic artist Alena Kučerová. Horseback riding through the countryside gives the rider freedom, connects him with it and also offers him space and silence.
Lucie Rašková's work is diverse, but at the same time very focused. From the very beginning themes are developed that can be observed in the changes and various forms in all areas and periods of her work. In the beginning, it strongly emphasizes space, not cosmic space but rather proximate: landscape and nature, space mapped out by roads, details of grasses, trees and their shadows. That is, the landscape of individual perception of the "external world". But she is also interested in the "inner" space: the interior of rooms and houses, in the mazes of their corridors. Both spatial aspects, this outside and inside, are expressed using an economical scale located between black and white, in other words between darkness and light.
In 1995, Lucie Raškovová participated in the International Summer Academy in Salzburg in courses led by Adriena Šimotová. In connection with this creative stay, nine graphic sheets of the Half-Worlds cycle were created, which bring fantasy elements into the landscape and are further developed in the graphic set of landscapes called Dreams. She then develops the blurring of reality and its transfer to the dream realm in bibliophile illustrations, such as Aloysius Bertrand's fantasies of Joker of the Night (2010, published at his own expense), in which the painting wonderfully connects with the author's delusional and sarcastic world full of strangeness and impish ghosts. Here, too, one can notice her way of working, which is characterized by interconnecting cycles that develop and deepen the subject at the same time. In landscapes, it is usually a fascination with the space itself, its atmosphere and especially the details in the form of roads, trees and their shadows. The structure protruding from the surface of the printing plate often also plays an important role.
We can observe this aspect already in her final work at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in 1997. At that time, she chose Březina's poems for her bibliophile edition The Danger of Harvest, which she accompanied with eight etchings using the soft cover technique. In contrast to Březina's typically symbolist rhetoric of the "universe" resounding with cosmic music, Raškovová chooses a space that is apparent, tangible and visible, whether it is "on the road" or in an inner space with a maze of corridors and walls. Both spaces possess their own sense of loneliness, melancholy and sadness. They are present in the landscape and on the roads lined with trees and their shadows. The feeling for the landscape, the stratification of light and darkness gives them a special rhythm, which, although it recalls the landscapes of symbolism, is in Raškov's depiction one of pure experience. In this connection, we might recall the etchings of Ladislav Čepelák from the second half of the 20th century, which are similarly based on a scale of two "non-colours" (black and white) and a feeling of emptiness.
For Raškovová, this feeling is also contained in etchings for small bibliophile editions with poems by Jan Skácel, such as A Little Review of Snow (1997, published at his own expense), whose black and white variety also expresses the "fullness of snowy silence". This feature has already been touched upon by Professor Jiří Šalamoun in his summary of Lucie Raškovová's study, when he mentions "a strange seriousness (...) in the tense silence of the old world, compelling one with a force of will to dampen the tension and to freeze in a special stillness of photographic moments.
Shortly after graduation, she illustrates Jaroslav Havlíček's Kerosene Lamps for the Book Club, which is accompanied by reproductions of etchings with empty interiors, illuminated only by kerosene lamplight. Although the story offers very expressive situations, which we know, for example from the films of Juraj Herz, Raškovová is again satisfied with a black-and-white palette and spatial minimalism, which only increases the oppressiveness of the story. Although Havlíček's Kerosene Lamps represented a departure from the bibliophile edition, it was not a significant departure from his personal subject. The sense of the rawness of the landscape and the emptiness of space, which does not need a figure to express melancholy, is one of the characteristic features of a certain line of Czech art, in which the landscape becomes the bearer of inner events and feelings, as is evident, for example, in the landscapes of Antonín Slavíček or the etchings of the aforementioned Ladislav Čepelák.
Raškovová, however, also illustrates books intended primarily for young readers, sometimes even the youngest ones, as in the case of a concertina book based on folk song motifs Lullaby (2013, published at her own expense), which is also an example of her specific work with colour. Also intended for children is her book of rhymes Don’t Grumble and Babble, which Raškovová published at her own expense with graphic design by Jaromír Štoural in 2012, fifty copies. The quatrains for each of the letters of the Latin alphabet are reminiscent of the nonsense humour upon which the poetics of the English Limerick are built. Jiří G. Mann's Lizard on Graveland Other Incidents, which she illustrated for the Thyrsus publishing house in 2010, belongs to the same genre. The book was graphically arranged by Luboš Drtina, whose concept of "moving typography" is graphic art in its purest form.
The titles illustrated by Lucie Raškovová for various publishers excel not only in their rich imagery, but also in the specific way they approach the text. The book Solitude is Not Bad, which she wrote and accompanied with rich illustrations, was published in 2015 by the Brkola publishing house. (This book was nominated for the Magnesia Litera Award as Discovery of the Year.) Here, too, features appear that are characteristic of Lucie Raškovová's work. It is primarily a connection to her own life experience and a typical reflection of life attitudes. The characters seem to hint to the reader that they have some sort of genuine prototype. They are endowed with specific characteristics that establish a real typology of the story. The elderly are endowed with the wisdom of life, affection, but also longing. Péťa's father is a sailor who spends most of the year away from home. One of the most important characters in the story is the neighbour’s dog, the eponymous Solitude. The story, as well as its illustrations, is permeated with brightness and a sense of happiness, but it also has its shadows - not only in grief over the departure of some creatures or their long absence. It describes and depicts the values that create the fullness of life and thus is a bit like a fairy tale or a nostalgic dream.
The illustrations of the books that precede the author's novella Solitude is Not Bad are also intended for young readers. For Albatros, Raškovová illustrated Mark Twain's books The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (2005) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (2007). It is not easy to illustrate these stories after the work of Kamil Lhoták, whose pictorial accompaniment remains iconic for young and older readers alike. Lhoták brought the pioneering period of America to life with his admiration for 19th century technology, with its steamships, bicycles and self-propelled machines. By contrast, Lucie Raškovová follows the plot and sees its characters as characteristic types in their natural environment – both outdoors and at home. Images of boys' games, their secrets and capers play a big role in it, which is often difficult for the world of adults to comprehend. The illustrations in concert with the text reflect the atmosphere of the English-language and the new English-language novel, recalling 19th-century society, seen through the prism of the founder of the modern American novel, Nathaniel Hawthorn. Raškovová develops the story as a rich and free pictorial narrative, and, in the case of Tom Sawyer, with only black and white drawings. It is obvious that the empathy that is evident in her illustrations has its source in her own experience with the world of children.
In some of her books, her method of pictorial narration changes and she approaches the style of comics. Somewhere the subject itself encourages this; she wants to capture everything in the greatest possible diversity with regard to the speed of information. In the travel diary SPAIN (2019) the author tells a story in the manner of "holiday readings". The graphic design by Karel Haloun and Jan Zich uses a somewhat different artistic language than that "spoken" by Lucie Raškovová. Her story about a holiday stay is in the form of an advertising newspaper intended for distribution on the beach. With the comic stylization of the illustrative accompaniment, Raškovová satisfies the author of the text and graphic designer, Karel Haloun, in his dramatic plays on words collected in the book The Edge of the Game (Brkola, 2019).
Their collaboration was also reflected in Přemysl Janýr's book The Princess of Tapiti (Brkola, 2019). Together with the text, it evokes the memory of a distant method of man coexisting with nature in a kind of original, now forgotten connection. Previously this distant world was depicted and described by Paul Gauguin in his Noa - Noa texts, which may have influenced Janýr's work. Raškovová reflects upon this genesis, but at the same time enriches it. She depicts figures, phenomena and situations, which she complements with beautiful natural history panels with the images of birds, fish, boxes, shells and clams, which reside, from our point of view, almost at the end of the world. The panels and the method of their depiction are clearly from the past, but not so distant 19th century. She transforms everything into the memory of man's original relationship with the world, which he broke off himself, and this rift continues to widen.
In the last few years, the expression and themes of Lucie Raškovová's graphic work have changed radically. This development was brought about, among other things, by her transition to another graphic technology. She started working with the RISO SE 9380 reproduction machine, which facilitates the colour register of various artistic elements, often adopted, such as wastepaper, various vernaculars and found printed matter in combination with the author's inputs. At the same time, this technology offers a rich palette of colours and, above all, the possibility of overprinting collaged scrums. Even with this technique, however, Lucie Raškovová did not depart from her typical development of the subject in cycles. They consist of various thematically unified units of smaller graphic sheets, from which she also creates small series of calendars. These include the "animal" cycles Wilderness (2017) or Domestic: Guests (2018), where she placed decorative wallpapers beneath "portraits" of animals. In 2020, risographic postcards with birds emerged, the title of which is a quote from the magazine Science Daily: Bird watching improves mental health.
Focused observations of the surrounding world appear in Raškovová’s work in another unusual form. At a certain time, she began using a mobile phone to create a photographic diary of her everyday journeys from her home in Košice through Anděl to inner Prague, which resulted in small-format prints with an inkjet printer on high-quality paper, which she concluded in a cycle called Memory is Almost Full. The world behind the windowpanes of the tram is often distorted by rain, the dimness of street lighting and the chaos of external events. The characters are blurred, deformed by the movement and dirt of the windows, which reflect and induce melancholy. Just like both the external and internal events.
It may seem unusual that after the story illustration sets, Lucie Raškovová's work suddenly begins to feature graphic work whose themes are narrowly defined: domestic animals or wildlife. Their portraits look as if they were hung on the walls of old flats, thanks to the decorative areas of the background prints, which bear no burden of civilization. They represent a certain cleansing ecological cross-section, as well as a reminder of a lost time. It was as if they suggested some sort of distant coexistence with everything. The concept of coexistence is also one of the keys to the nature of Lucie Raškovová's entire work.
Jan Rous (For circumstances concerning the origin of the text above, see the correspondence below.)
Correspondence with Jan Rous
Dear Professor.
I hope that you are doing as well as possible and that you are enjoying a peaceful end of the summer. I am writing to you for completely mercenary and selfish reasons. I turned fifty in February, which was surprisingly enough sufficient reason for organizing a solo exhibition at the Hollar Gallery. I have been promised a date at the end of May and beginning of June of next year. I have put together a brief summary, attached, and I wanted to ask you if you would be willing to write a short text for the exhibition. It will actually be a bit of everything, so whatever you remember will probably be there (that is, if I remember). I'll probably write something too, but since I approach the world with my hands rather than my head, it would be wonderful if your text would be something to satisfy even a potentially erudite viewer and reader.
I wish you a pleasant remainder of the holiday and look forward to hearing from you.
P. S. say hello to Zuzana. Lucie Raškovová
P. P. S. Hollar Gallery, May / June 2021,
name: You do not have to unscrew the lid, there is a hole in it.
Dear Lucie R.,
You know I'm not a professor, and they’ll lock me up for using an unauthorized title, like many senators and MPs. But I will be happy to attend the exhibition, even though you know what it was like with Z. Nejedlý “... yes Jan Jakub Ryba, we always ate fish (in czech "ryba") at Christmas.” It means that it is no longer advisable to let me do many things, but rather I must be monitored. Since I walk on two crutches and our car looks like a write-off, Zuzana will take me for a rehab stay on September 7th somewhere far away and will stay with me for a week. I will have to stay there for another 3 weeks unattended, but right after that I will come see you. But I will want to see and learn as much as possible; I am a demanding inmate. Greetings to you all, I have no new music, just a brilliant recording of a Beethoven piano sonata performed by Friedrich Gulda, whom I saw sometime in the late 1960s. Even inmates get older. I look forward to seeing you.
jr
Hello.
Wonderful and thank you. We still have quite a bit of time. Mainly I would need a text for something between a catalogue and a monograph since I would like to exhibit a cross-section of everything I have created over thirty years. I don't mind that you're not a professor. I always recall a line from the film Men About Town, “A lady can often be a downright swine.” Thus a professor can often be a downright fool.
Looking forward to seeing you.
Lr
