Petr Novak from Jaromer, sculptor

Short Biography

4.3. 2008

I was born and grew up in Jaroměř in Southern Bohemia, under influence of B. M. Braun’s baroque sculpting. Since the beginning of my life I’ve been interested in nature. At 10 I wanted to be a sailor, I wanted to illustrate my diaries abundantly. At 13 I wanted to be a painter and at 14 I wanted to be a sculptor. I studied at Secondary Sculpting School in Hořice v Podkrkonoší and then I studied at Academy of Visual Arts in Prague in professor’s Stanislav Hanzík’s specialized sculpting class. Nevertheless before that, I with a friend of mine, had made a 14-day-lasting journey to Roma and Florence and I had visited the sculptor Giacomo Manzú in Ardey, where is situated a huge collection of his sculptures, which he donated to the state.

I have become a passionate lover of Italy and an admirer of Italian renaissance as well as the modern Italian art. In the times of communist dictatorship there had been just a slender hope to visit Italy again. Nevertheless I studied Italian language and Italian art in the cultural center of Italian state in Prague. My sculptor’s opinion strengthened in feeling the classical values under the influence of local Baroque, the heritage of Rodin and the strong relationship with renaissance. After the Velvet Revolution in 1989 I used to visit Italy every year in the following decade to study Antic and Renaissance deeply.

In 1991 I joined the Sculptural symposium in Adnet near Saltzburg and from there I hitchhiked over Alps to Vicenza and back. As a sculptor I met Don Luciano Bavieri from Pianoro near Bologna, from where a friendly cooperation came after. I’ve carved a relief, out of Portuguese marble, with Saint Jacob for his church in Pianoro. In that time a new church of Saint Lucas started to be built in Bologna, where I delivered a relief with an evangelist of lime stone for the ambon and a one piece trachyte baptistery with seven biblical relieves on its sides.

In the same time, in the Czech Republic, I won a competition for a bronze life-size horse in trot. A wonderful world of horses and riding has revealed to me, during studying this theme, and I realized what possibilities of knowledge and self knowledge does a modern man have, if he realizes his comeback to nature as a rider. In the conception of my philosophy it is not a rider-sportsman. It is a rider on the way of rhythm, balance and respect in the interrelation to his horse, which is not considered to be a gymnastic apparatus, but he honors its beauty, considering the horse to be a beautiful and soulful Being, as it used to be in our old Slavic history. As a sculptor I find the proportion harmony of Old Greeks, renaissance and baroque sublimity as well as the Rodin’s cathedral in movement in the horse theme.

I don’t deal with that theme as with a genre, but in the sense of deeper spiritual acknowledgement of the world. For me the Life is a miracle of divine balance. (For example: If there were no moon, which balances the axial tilt of the Earth, there wouldn’t be any life upon the planet). For me the balance is the Good itself, the precondition for life. The loss of balance brings illness, insanity and death. All master pieces of art are based on the reached balance and each sincerely thought art struggles for it. Both music and horse ridding contain this balance, deal with it and demand it.

Addendum to my own CV

 I wanted to comply with the factual habits and describe my indescribable life in a matter-of-fact cube. Because it lacks the essence, I add it in this addendum.

My attitudes to artistic work and my civic views are based on the respect for all creation. Love opening the knowledge leads me to the convinction of the soul of trees and the life of stones. I continue with Aristotle's soul degrees even deeper below the degree of vegetative soul, because I think that life has not arisen as a combination of inanimate compounds but that it is the essence of all elements, that it is hidden in stardust and after billions of years its will will force the dust to experience consciousness.

Today on contrary sees the life as being inhalled in the mass or being drawn from the cosmos. He sees the spirit and next to it the matter, divided, or he does not accept the spirit at all. Since even today's science itself proves that all matter originated from nothing, I perceive it as soul-inspired, because it was created by the spirit. My fascination with nature is not only an amazement at its splendor and incomprehensible perfection, but it is also a sacred reverence for the source of its creation, for the holy depth, inaccessible for the human exploration, from which springs all that exists. Such a perception of reality makes it very difficult for me to interpret it. In order to encourage myself to fight with some clay to get it in a shape, I turn for help to music and try to build the statue on the organic principles of music. Such an approach to sculpting is not only based on my own considerations, but is also derived from the sculptural Baroque tradition of my region, which was founded mainly by Master Matyas Bernard Braun. His magnificent, dynamic and falred sculptures are always the music in a rock, composed of architectural plastic rhythms that carry the whole melody, always humanly warm and participating. It is hard, apart from the sincere admiration to such a genius, to hang together something next to him, but an odd hope always drives me into further work.

This is the essence of my life, which is missing in my CV, and was delivered in this addendum.

 

Petr Novák

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