Jan Vohradský↓

About the work

What Was and What Is No Longer

#reflection #stopping #return #open-air #cross

What is your graduation work about?

My graduation work relates to working with history. I am interested in our human imagination and the possibility of getting at least a sense of the time from which we are more than half a century away. Although my work relates to the Second World War period, the title What Was and What Is No Longer, as I write in my defense, can touch upon whatever is gone, except for the fragments that inspire us.

What do you do besides your graduation work?

Since early 2020, I have focused on drawing and painting portraits of distinguished figures in human history and culture, of which there must be about two hundred. I employ multiple techniques, and when I post them on Facebook every week, add biographical information. It is a combination of art and education that works for me. It is related to the graduation work in that, for example, the village of Lidice, which projects into my subject, also consisted of individual human stories and fates. I became particularly aware of this interconnectedness while visiting the local museum.

In what conditions would you like to work on your graduation work?

It would ideally be at the place where it all happened. I would not mind being surrounded by people from the Lidice Museum watching the progress of my work. Because that creates a kind of transference: you visit that particular place and then return to the school and work on something. However, you are merely putting in your experience from the spot but are not in immediate confrontation with it anymore.

What would you imagine to be an alternative culmination of your studies at AVU, in place of the defense of your graduation work?

It is an interesting question. Perhaps given how I draw these portraits, I would complete my studies with a lecture series for students of the entire school instead of just my studio. I might even take them to a place where a famous person lived or to museums. I think that my future work will still focus on history or updating it because it is a subject that I do not want to lose for myself.