My journey

I knew I wanted to be an artist by the age of five and I had attended art lessons for artistic children in The Public School of Art once a week for eight years until I was fourteen.

My teacher was well known for her pastels paintings and she often let us, her little students, work with this medium. I can still remember the large blue boxes filled with “fat colorful sticks”. We did lots of still lifes and tasks based on our own imagination and I fell in love with pastel forever.

Little by little I would be painting the landscapes everywhere I went. My summers were filled with journeys to the countryside, with a rucksack on my back and a folding stand in my hand. Alone or with a group of artists of any age, sleeping in the village schools.

At the age of seventeen I passed the talent exam at The College of Art in Prague and spent the most blessed years of my school life there. 

A year after I finished college I got married and our first two children arrived very quickly one after another, but I kept painting whenever it was possible.

My husband has always been a great  supporter and bought me hundreds of Czech made soft pastels in May 1994, five years after The Velvet Revolution and shortly before the prices increased rapidly in The Czech Republic.

I still work with them till this day. 

In 1995 I went back to university to study art again. A year before I finished my studies in 1999 I and my husband and our first two children went to the USA for six months.

We often traveled from Mississippi to Florida where I lectured art lessons for children.

There are wonderful white sanded beaches around Pensacola Florida, so I would take the children there to use glue and that sand as the background of their paintings and immerse into the sensation of hearing and smelling the ocean while creating their art.

I also made some sketches myself to remind me of this bright seashore area when I am back in my home country.

I finished my uni studies in 2000 with the series of large pastel paintings inspired by those white sanded beaches and I titled it: "The Sea"

Since that time I have been painting wherever life took me. In the highlands, in flooded quarries, in people's yards. Abroad in France, in Croatia, in Montenegro, in Slovakia.

I lived in England where I painted the most colorful set of my art which I titled “Sweet disorder” because that is the best way to describe English type of gardening. I love wild overgrown gardens, parks and spots in the countryside.

Nature is the best studio, so I keep working and get my inspiration there.