Věra Nováková

“I suddenly realized that this really was a certain path. For me, that was a novelty because I had previously lived in a certain illusion. Ivan Sobotka was from a Moravian village, he was a catholic from a traditional Moravian-catholic family which had annoyed him. He would always say: ‘Those crones get out from the church and gossip.’ So he parted with it for a while but eventually began to drift back. It had a great influence on me as well, that I have to say, because I felt that there was a positive solution in it. This brought me to engaging with it closely. This is why I say that communist comrades brought me towards Christianity. Because they showed me the fake path of the illusion about creating a heaven on earth through somebody giving orders and persecuting the inconvenient people, even murdering them. This all lead to me seeing Christianity as a possible way out.”

“I think everyone needs an antipodean. An opponent who would ensure that you don’t go nuts or bore yourself to death. We had eventually never been bored. Me and my husband lead an often harsh but reviving dialogue. Dialogue is a mild name for a struggle of opinion. In retrospect, I see it as a positive thing. Because it prevented me from going nuts in the sense of sticking to something without having a critical distance from it and thinking things through. From saying: ‘This is how things are.’”

“What was rather stupid was that we had only received minimal reflection and feedback. At first me and Ivan Sobotka would go public quite a bit, talk about it all. So did the late Jitka Stibralová-Kolínská, a well-known painter, so did Richard Fremund – but not a whole lot. Anyway, painting without publishing was rather unhealthy. We always hoped that it would change one day. I for instance got used to it so much that to go public with it in the 1990s… When Viktor and Tereza organized this exhibition of ours, held in Ženské domovy, for me it was like creeping out from a dark cellar, from the catacombs, to full sunlight.”