Pavel Kreml

“Pejša and I and the other boys saw it as a sport. We always applied somewhere, they refused to exhibit us, but it was an opportunity for us to meet. We didn’t see each other the whole year through, sometimes, but we knew we’d meet up because we were going to apply to this that place, and then we’ll go to pick up our paintings because they wouldn’t display them, so we’d meet there, go have a beer, a chat, and so on.”

“‘The region where I live and work’ was its title. That was the assignment. So I painted a picture. It was a gypsy girl, but a blonde one, a portrait. And then a map of the republic, the North Bohemian Region, with beer caps. So of course they didn’t exhibit me. They even told me that those beer caps were insulting. And they scratched the gypsy. There was a cut across the face. One of them told: ‘Oh, someone here said it wasn’t painted, so he tested it like that.’ So they just ruined it. Then they couldn’t exhibit it, seeing that it was ruined. So that was there excuse.”