Flowers Not Grown Anywhere Else

Anna Zemankova, Untitled (second half of 1960s), pastel and ballpoint pen on paper

Like most artists, Anna Zemánkova was encouraged, from a very young age, to pursue a more lucrative career. From the age of fifteen to eighteen she studied dentistry, and then worked as a dental technician until her marriage, when she forwent paid labor in order to care for her children. In 1948 she and her family moved to Prague, and when she found herself increasingly depressed, her son, a sculptor, implored her to pursue the creative work she had previously disavowed. Early in the morning, before anyone else arose, she’d sketch pastel and ink onto large swaths of paper, creating botanical dreamscapes all her own. As a self-taught artist, Zemánková tends to be described as Art Brut, but her Art Brut is of a mysterious and magical strain. She believed her inspiration was derived from a divine source: “I am growing flowers,” she said, “that are not grown anywhere else.” Following a major retrospective of her work at The Collection de l’Art Brut in Switzerland last summer, Kant books has released a stunning 300 page monograph.

Anna Zemánkova, Infinite Flower, first half of 1960s, pastel, tempera and India ink on paper

Anna Zemánkova, Untitled, first half of 1960s, pastel on paper

Anna Zemánkova, Untitled, first half of 1960s, pastel and India ink on paper

Anna Zemánkova, Untitled, first half of 1960s, pastel, cooking oil and India ink on paper

Excerpted from Anna Zemánkova, edited by Anežka Šimková and Terezie Zemánková, and released in March 2018. Published by arrangement with Kant Books.

from The Paris Review https://ift.tt/2vYsNOJ

Comments

The Sphere

Photograph by Elena Saavedra Buckley. Once when I was about twelve I was walking down the dead-end road in Albuquerque where I grew up, around twilight with a friend. Far beyond the end of the road was a mountain range, and at that time of evening it flattened into a matte indigo wash, like a mural. While kicking down the asphalt we saw a small bright light appear at the top of the peaks, near where we knew radio towers to occasionally emit flashes of red. But this glare, blinding and colorless, grew at an alarming rate. It looked like a single floodlight and then a tight swarm beginning to leak over the edge of the summit. My friend and I became frightened, and as the light poured from the crest, our murmurs turned into screams. We stood there, clutching our heads, screaming. I knew this was the thing that was going to come and get me. It was finally going to show me the horrifying wiring that lay just behind the visible universe and that was inside of me too. And then, a couple se...

DEMOCRACY DAY SPEECH BY PMB; MAY 29 2016

www.naijaloaded.com My compatriots, It is one year today since our administration came into office. It has been a year of triumph, consolidation, pains and achievements. By age, instinct and experience, my preference is to look forward, to prepare for the challenges that lie ahead and rededicate the administration to the task of fixing Nigeria. But I believe we can also learn from the obstacles we have overcome and the progress we made thus far, to help strengthen the plans that we have in place to put Nigeria back on the path of progress. We affirm our belief in democracy as the form of government that best assures the active participation and actual benefit of the people. Despite the many years of hardship and disappointment the people of this nation have proved inherently good, industrious tolerant, patient and generous. The past years have witnessed huge flows of oil revenues. From 2010 average oil prices were $100 per barrel. But economic and security co...

The Private Life: On James Baldwin

JAMES BALDWIN IN HYDE PARK, LONDON. PHOTOGRAPH BY ALLAN WARREN. Via Wikimedia Commons , licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 . In his review of James Baldwin’s third novel, Another Country , Lionel Trilling asked: “How, in the extravagant publicness in which Mr. Baldwin lives, is he to find the inwardness which we take to be the condition of truth in the writer?” But Baldwin’s sense of inwardness had been nourished as much as it had been damaged by the excitement and danger that came from what was public and urgent. Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni’s Room dramatized the conflict between a longing for a private life, even a spiritual life, and the ways in which history and politics intrude most insidiously into the very rooms we try hardest to shut them out of. Baldwin had, early in his career, elements of what T. S. Eliot attributed to Henry James, “a mind so fine that it could not be penetrated by an idea.” The rest of the time, however, he did not have this luxury, as pub...

TOBI'S DESK

Search This Blog