I can’t draw, and I really mean can’t. When I first started school, my teacher was so concerned with my inability to draw, and to form letters in a neat enough fashion, that she summoned my parents to school to warn them that they should consider getting me some extra tuition if they didn’t want me to end up in a special needs school.

The teacher even recommended someone teaching in the local (afterschool) arts school for specially talented kids, and so one afternoon soon after my mother took me down there for the mandatory ‘audition’, so I could join a drawing class. I was given some crayons, and was told to draw my favourite fairytale character, while the teacher and my mother chatted for about half an hour (a conversation that turned out to be the beginning of a life long friendship).

What I produced that afternoon could be described most kindly as a highly abstract drawing rich in black, red and yellow, and more honestly as total mess; my mother visibly embarrassed. But the art teacher (who I am sure was forewarned by my primary school teacher what this was all about) didn’t flinch, and for a number of years from there on I spent one afternoon a week after school in the art class.

Jarmila Totušková is (and was already back then) a bonafide artist, an accomplished illustrator and engraver, and the classes she taught were most varied: we drew with charcoal, pastels and ink pens, we painted, lino printed, worked sheet coper, and, naturally, clobbered together things from clay and other materials. It didn’t do much for my actual abilities, drawing or writing, but it was fun.

The one downside of attending art classes was that back at the day school this created certain expectations of one’s abilities, and as the teachers changed from year to year, I had to go through an annual process of being found out as an imposter.

The communist regime in old Czechoslovakia saw art fundamentally as a propaganda tool, and in the course of the year different state celebrations were associated with school-wide art competitions. I assume there was some reward in this for the teacher who’s pupil and/or class won, and so at the start of each year enquiries were made who went to the art school, and at times extra allowances were made to these individuals to improve the odds. On a couple of occasions I tried concealing the fact that I went to art classes, but a helpful ‘comrade’ always ratted me out.

And so in the run up to the 7th November (marking the Bolshevik October revolution of 1917), we were all expected to produce exquisite paintings of the cruiser Aurora, preferably with flames spewing out of the gun barrel, the (as legend has it) signal for the storming of the Winter Palace of the Tzar. Alas, my Auroras were not of propaganda standard.

In February came the paintings of the People’s Militia marking the Czech communist pseudo-revolution of 1948; well, if I could not produce a passable art around the Aurora, you can imagine what I did with the human form …

By the time it came to the triumphant images of T-34 tanks clad in blooms of lilac in May, the expectations of what could be expected from me were considerably tempered; one year I even overheard my teacher discussing with another how it was even possible for someone so inept to be allowed to attend art classes. (It was a valid question, even if a bit mean.)

Thing is, the above mentioned annual embarrassment aside, I was never particularly bothered by not being able to draw, and the special needs school was not mentioned again, for even though I never mastered neat handwriting, my writing was functional enough, and apart from drawing tanks, and PE, I found school easy enough.

I was reminded of all of this a couple of days ago when an unexpected package dropped through the letterbox: a friend send me a notebook, all the way from Australia, to work on my drawing skills! The memories it brought made me smile; and notebooks are, of course, immensely useful. But drawing? I don’t think so. 🙂

I know by now that my brain is simply wired differently, it’s a big picture brain that excels at seeing patterns, connections, at navigating complex systems, but in order to do that, it tends to gloss over minutia. And the one thing above all it can’t do is to conjure up (visual) beauty out of nothing.

Over the years I have had the privilege to work with some extremely talented ‘creatives’ who can do just that, and came to understand that this is not something that you can teach yourself; one either has this kind of creative imagination, and then can (and should) nurture and develop it, or does’t have it, and then best that can be hoped for is derivative competence (of which there is no shortage in our world).

Yet, while I lack the creative imagination that could conjure up beauty out of nothing, I too have a creative urge, and I know beauty just fine when I see it. And while it comes in all shapes and forms, for me it has always been found primarily in nature, it’s where I have been most at home for over fifty years now, and it has a powerful emotional hold on me. And that’s why I am a landscape photographer — the creative force of nature steps in where my own imagination is failing me, and the possibilities are literally infinite.

But for much of the fifty years I have struggled with expressing what I see, even through photography. It was only when I started analog printing seven years ago that I finally found a way which allows me to express what (and how) I see clearly and in a compelling way. With hindsight I don’t find this particularly surprising: analogue photography is, on the most basic level, about understanding and controlling physical processes, and that is, something I am naturally good at, so I have been able to develop ways that make it possible to transfer what I see out there onto the paper. (Same goes for the large format camera — it suits my way of seeing, and I can work it just fine.)

Is it art? Does it make me an artist?

Honestly? I could not care less. For me the print is a communicative act: I print because I see what I think merits being seen and hence frozen in time and shared, and that’s all that matters.

(Yet, all that said, even now the handwriting still holds a sting in the tail, for the scariest part of producing a print is having to sign it. But I am told people like prints being signed, so I console myself with thinking ‘they can always cover it up with a mount’.)