I studied at the academy in the 1970s and began to be on the lookout for predecessors close to my heart. I found them in the personalities of Manet, Courbet, Purkyně or Kremlička. The Spanish Velazquez enthralled me with the colourfulness of his paintings and put in the shade the other great masters who appeared to me duller even though amazing. “That´s some painting,” I used to tell myself, “it´s a fascinating tradition which started in Venice with Giorgione and Tizian.”

It would be a great pity if painting should vanish. It is a treasure worth much for the mankind to have it.

An artist´s efforts do not consist in an often desperate chase after something new and shocking, but in concentrated long-range work, work done with real and great love for the art, the people, for what generations of artists of the past as well as those of the recent present have left us. Painting requires artistic knowledge as well as craftsmanship which have disappeared. If our civilization finds itself without art, it will be threatened with becoming barbarous, course and insensitive. And hence we should not refuse traditions, we should not refuse the past in a nihilistic way as if there were nothing in it to learn from. That´s why I say ‘Yes’ to tradition but it should be continued in a modern contemporary language.