Martin Mešša
Tibor Kobliček is currently one of the most significant Slovak personalities in the creation of musical instruments. His interest in folk musical instruments and their production extends far beyond the borders of the region where he was born and lives. Moreover, apart from folk musical and sound instruments, he is devoted to historical instruments. There are nearly twenty types of them. He has based his musical, signing, interpretational talent, skills, technical thinking and individual artistic taste on his aim-conscious, systematic and exploratory work. The individual decoration of the majority of the instruments is probably the most significant characteristic of his production. His artistic thinking is demonstrated in the variability of the ornaments, their development, and the creation of his own ornaments based on older patterns in their techniques but unquestionably influenced by Koblička’s creativity. To some degree he uses practically all the techniques known to the Slovak folk woodcarving craft. The polemics are raised for those instruments where he uses decorations on those places and parts of the instruments which were not decorated in the past. It is evident that Kobliček tries to preserve the principles of folk ornamentalism – shortcuts, simplifications, direct or formal symmetry without regard to the technique used, either consciously or intuitively. By signing his instruments he preserves his authorship.