Jaroslav Róna

* 1957

  • “Suddenly, 21 August, the radio blaring real loud, and someone sobbing. So I woke up, heard crying, Mum was crying like crazy, the radio was blaring something, a rumbling in the sky and machine guns rat-tat-tat-tating in the city. I thought to myself: ‘Finally something’s happening!’ I was thrilled. Then I got up and looked out of the window. The fence was flat on the ground, there were tank tracks leading from it, and the tank’s barrel was stuck just two metres from my face. I gaped at it all goggle-eyed, and there were five Ruskies there, Mongols with bare shaven heads, in ugly grey clothes, chewing at some mash. I goggled at them, and they at me. What’s going on? So I went into the kitchen and was told we’d been occupied by the Ruskies. So my sister and I, I was eleven, she thirteen, we founded a resistance group. So we wrote these anti-Russian leaflets and put them in letterboxes. Then I drew the field with the tanks and the airplanes, because the tanks were on a field, and I hid it under the bath for future generations. We won’t hide our truth. So I stuck it under the bath, it probably fell apart there. Then we moved away. That was for the future generations, in case we’d die.”

  • “I was eighteen and I went to see Zanussi’s film at Star Cinema, the film was called The Illumination. He’s a Polish director, brilliant. The protagonist, a young man, didn’t know what to do with his life, what to do in Socialist Poland, he was completely forlorn. I sat there and told myself: What about you, you’re the same as he is, and you don’t know what, either. And suddenly it was really as if some angel had descended upon me, and I heard a voice in my head: You’ll be a painter. Like some kind of light, as if someone had spoken to me from somewhere. Completely and totally unbelievable. It filled me with the unbreakable conviction that I would be a painter. I said to myself: Oh, so I’ll be a painter. I went home, woke my parents up, told them that I had a vision in the cinema and that I would be a painter. Dad said that if I was accepted to the school, he’d help me with everything. From that moment I began preparing for the exams, I began drawing, and since then I’ve been churning along like a motorised mouse, so I haven’t had a moment’s time.”

  • “When the Russians came here, I was eleven years old at the time, my family voted whether we’d emigrate or not, so it was decided we’d emigrate. Because we didn’t know what the Russians would do, and Dad thought that they might start loading us on trains to the gulags again. He was phobic about it. So in the summer of sixty-nine we travelled to Geneva, where we stayed in the house of one of Dad’s friends, a furrier, who was very well-off - that’s why they had me train as a furrier afterwards. We were there in emigration for about a month, and then Mum said it couldn’t go on like that, and so she forced us all to get up and back into the car and go back into Communism. At night, sometime in early September we crossed the border at Rozvadov, the only car to come back, and the other lane was jammed up with an endless line of emigrants with fully loaded cars. I looked out of the window, it was raining, the road was covered in puddles, a hole, and the yellowed reflections of lamps at the crossing. Soldiers were standing around, and we slowly drove back into Bohemia, and everyone in that line of cars were tapping their foreheads, so we came back greeted by an endless guard of honour, all tapping their foreheads.”

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Praha, 23.04.2015

    (audio)
    délka: 02:13:02
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Fates of Artists in Communist Czechoslovakia
  • 2

    Praha, 04.05.2015

    (audio)
    délka: 01:19:58
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Fates of Artists in Communist Czechoslovakia
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To be seen, so that I can be heard

Jaroslav Róna 2015
Jaroslav Róna 2015
zdroj: natáčení ED

Academic sculptor Jaroslav Róna was born on 27 April 1957 in Prague into the family of an energy specialist and an office worker. His father Bedřich Róna came from a family of Slovak Jews, during the war he hid with his parents in Slovakia and Hungary. In summer 1969 the Róna family decided to emigrate to Switzerland, but after just one month abroad they returned to Czechoslovakia. After finishing primary school in 1972 Jaroslav Róna trained as a furrier at Kara Hlinsko, in 1975-1978 he attended the Secondary Vocational School of Art in Prague. After completing the school he went on to study as an artistic glazier under Prof. Stanislav Libenský at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague, graduating in 1984. In 1985 he spent several months as Prof. Libenský‘s assistant at a summer school of glazing in Pilchuck in the USA. Since the mid-1980s he is a member of the theatre group Pražská pětka (Prague Five). Since 1985 Jaroslav Róna exhibits his paintings, drawings, and sculptures both independently and within the art group Tvrdohlaví (The Headstrongs), of which he is a founding member. In the years 2005-2012 he taught at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. He is the author of the Franz Kafka Memorial (2003) in the Prague Old Town. He makes sculptures, paintings, drawings, book illustrations, scenic designs, and his works can be found in both public and private collections at home and abroad. Jaroslav Róna lives and works in Prague.