She was the first painter of images on glass in the second half of the 20th century in Slovakia. She started painting around the year 1960 and still leads a small group of creators who are dedicated to painting pictures on glass. By profession a drawing teacher, she studied fine arts at the College of Education. Her interest was drawn...
She was the first painter of images on glass in the second half of the 20th century in Slovakia. She started painting around the year 1960 and still leads a small group of creators who are dedicated to painting pictures on glass. By profession a drawing teacher, she studied fine arts at the College of Education. Her interest was drawn to charming old glass paintings, whose forms she began to dress in new clothes. As a talented artist with a perfect understanding of drawing, she quickly delved into the essence of Slovak folk art and the world of old glass paintings to learn from them. She varied the old and created new motifs, as well as her own, individual rendition. She was able to quickly replace old themes with new ones, her own, tied in the first stage with folk tradition in the broadest sense. From the beginning, she did not copy, but through her unique style transformed motifs found in old paintings. She entered the art of glass painting with an already formed artistic opinion – her style is identifiable at first glance. In 1966, she started collaborating with the Crafts and Arts Association. The range of her motifs is boundless – from religious themes through prosaic, traditional, festive to everyday, she imprinted them all with her own personal touch. She retold many fairy tales to us and taught us to recognize fairytale beings, bringing us closer to Jánošík and his brigands in unusual variations. She educated us about forgotten professions and conjured up the world of nature in its most attractive form. She is constantly pondering and inventing. She conceived and realized three-part folding portable altars with Christmas and other motifs multiple times, which can be hung on the wall or placed next to a nativity scene. She painted some images not only “under glass,” but also on the other side of the glass, creating incredibly interesting compositions of intertwining colors and elements. On one of the images, she painted lichen on the upper side, while underneath the glass a beauty galloped on horseback through the landscape. The synergy was and is unbelievable. The artist fills her images with immense care and poetry, skillfully working with means that only a professional artist can master and use. Her decoration, which fills the surface of the image like the old masters did, takes on and multiplies some elements, but when applied to the glass surface, it finds a measure of sustainability, and moreover, in color and composition, it always corresponds to framing the central scene. After a while, when she became more interested in the character or story, she did not need to complement them with special decorations; it was enough for her to draw from the teachings of nature, which she countless times varied in her images. In the 1980s, we could witness other types of artifacts from the creative workshop of this artist. These included, for example, pendants painted on ceramics for necklaces or glass paintings on wooden boxes, which also briefly entered the assortment of the Crafts and Arts Association. In the past decade, she incorporated folk elements from the Czech environment into the narratives of her images to cater to not only Slovak, but also Czech admirers of her work. In the so-called Prague images, she paints old stylistic architecture and everything that interested her from the history of Prague, where she has lived for half a century, including old tales of monarchs and Prague fairytale creatures. The path she has taken in her work is a source of certainty and joy for her. She did not come out of the rural environment, she does not stylize herself to belong there, but she is inherently interested in everything related to it, so that she can later bring it with fascination into her images. She is not a folk artist. She is an artist who masters all the intricacies of glass painting, as well as folk traditions. She imbues her images with beauty, tenderness, and emotion – all the most positive, distinctly feminine gifts of the spirit