A conversation with George Bohdal

At what age did you start to paint?

Remembering my tender years I see myself always with brushes and pencils in my hands. It is said that I was born with them. As a child, I sketched and painted everything around me from landscapes and cityscapes to all my family members. I also loved painting exotic places that I knew only from the postcards and photographs, which my father supplied me with from his frequent business assignments abroad.

Do you remember the time when you sold your first painting?

Yes. I remember that moment very well. I was not in school yet. I was about five years old when I painted a small watercolor with a beach, blue ocean and two palm trees. I remember the light brown trunks of the palm trees, they were like flower pots stacked up on top of each other. I had this painting hanging on the wall when a friend of my mother visited. She was so impressed with it that she really wanted to have it. I guess she was too uncomfortable to ask me for it so she offered to buy it. So I received five Czech Crowns and she got the painting.

From your first sale to being represented in some prominent collections and galleries now passed many years. When did you first exhibit your work in public?

It was in the mid 60’s. I was about fifteen years old. One spring day I was walking on the historic Charles Bridge in Prague. There was this young boy about my age, playing the violin, something that sounded to me like some experimental music. Beside him along the stone fence were lined up small paintings reminiscent of surrealistic landscapes of Salvador Dali. We had a conversation and we hit it together right away. From then on I joined him and exhibited my work on the Charles bridge almost every day. But at that time the bridge had a very different atmosphere of course.

What were your paintings like then? Have you always painted in a figurative style?

I came to painting through a need to record life around me. But it was in those years of exhibiting on the Charles Bridge when I started to flirt with abstraction. I started to create expressionistic abstract paintings inspired by music and poetry. I was working in an abstract mode still many years later. Even in the year 1979 when I exhibited at Quebec Biennale II my work was still abstract.

How did this long-term experience with abstract painting influence your realistic work today?

I often look at painting on an abstract level as a composition of colors and shapes. It does not really matter if the painting is representational or abstract. Its compositional details have to work together between themselves as well as in a whole composition. The experience with abstract painting did increase my sensitivity to the construction of a painting. It helped me to create better representational paintings

What is your attitude to abstract painting today, abstract expressionism, for example?

Abstract expressionism, same as geometric or other abstract work, was important in its own time. I like it for its spontaneity as well as for the purity of form in hard-edge geometric abstract work. I liked a lot the New York School of abstract expressionism in a past. It was important at that time, but we are many decades later. And now I am always disappointed to see new abstract paintings which not only bring nothing new but have no soul or spirit either.

How do you see the contemporary art scene dominated by conceptual art, installations, and video productions? Do you think that painting will disappear?

I see many of the new media as a good instrument for those who are artistically impotent and whose creativity and talent are on the level of some government clerks. Today anyone who is big enough to hold a camera and has access to a computer printer can produce large photographs of nothing and be an artist. The art schools and universities are churning out thousands of graduates with degrees who are now artists, curators, art critics, or directors of mammoth art institutions that the governments or private companies created with taxpayer’s money. Virtually hundreds of millions are spent on art. All those involved in arts are under pressure to produce more so they could justify their need for more handouts. I think that the tyranny of self-indulgent conceptual art, installations, and countless videos are a fad that will fade away. I ask what will remain out of this art in two hundred years? Who will want to see it if any of it will remain at all? The times have changed, we face many different problems today than people did hundreds of years ago, but we have changed very little, if at all, in being human. We share many of the same qualities and needs as men did thousands of years ago. We find the statue of a Greek goddess or the Mona Lisa portrait as beautiful today as people did at the time of their creation. The reason is simple. It touches our innate feelings and our emotions because it has something to tell us because its beauty gives us pleasure. These works have both, they have the mastery of execution and the spirit of eternal beauty. I believe that some of the art created today that is composed of nothing else than a new media gimmick will represent no more excitement in the future than an empty bottle does for us today. I believe that painting is an expression of an innate human need. I believe that a painting that has both, the spiritual part and the quality of execution, will be with us forever.