Artist Marie Brozova's memoir of her public drawing event in Prague's Stromovka Park in front of the Planetarium.
When I was really small, my dad used to call me the apostle of the stars. No wonder, my first reading-book was a celestial atlas and then astronomy textbooks, so heavy that I was hardly able to lift them. But I determinately racked my brains over them, sometimes I even went with them to bed. Not that I understood any of these scientific books, but whenever I ran through their pages I felt like a sorcerer reading incantations from a magical book. All the unknown expressions seemed to me like tickets to infinity.
All I could do was learn by heart all the names of the stars, planets and their satellites. And thanks to my grandpa, an amateur astronomer and my frequent visits to the Prague Planetarium, I had a good sense of orientation in the starlit skies of every season (especially in the Prague sky, where I could spot only the brightest of the stars and most easily found constellations).
My mom often retells to me an unbelievable story from my astronomical past. I was about four years old and one winter evening I was with with my friends at the shabby playground near the Victoria Zizkov Football Stadium. We were all wearing the same ready-made ubiquitous winter overalls and mom was listening to our conversation. I was supposed to explain to them about infinity and all objects that could be found in the universe. Other mums stopped talking and were listening in awe to expressions like Venus, Sirius, Aldebaran, Pleiades, Orion… I can’t remember it but whenever my mum brings this story back, I recall Jan Neruda´s poem from his cycle, Cosmic Songs, about the gathering of frogs sitting in their puddle and discussing the far worlds, hidden somewhere among the stars in the sky and pondering if there are frogs over there as well. Our cosmic kindergarten debate must have been a pretty funny sight.
The educational machinery stopped my planned career in astronomy when I was about ten and my teachers persuaded me that I would never be able to think in numbers. Then would I become an artist? I could not think of anything that was such an obvious part of myself in terms of my future career. Drawing was as natural as breathing. But from mathematics I got my first bitter B on my report card, not at all the last, I admit. But I did not lose all love for the starlit sky and every summer I spent many nights lying on the roof of our small cottage with my telescope pointed at the nebulas in Swan constellation. Sometimes I had to hold tight to the roof when I had a vertiginous feeling of falling down into the universe that seemed to lie bellow me as a bottomless ocean.
The Prague Planetarium became a kind of sanctuary of my love for the stars. I attended the place regularly, as believers go to church. When I found out about the astronomical course in the Planetarium in 1997, I immediately entered and every week I went there across the beautiful park Stromovka, determined to put aside all my bad experience with mathematics. I was quite successful; I qualified as the third best student in the class of sixty students. My fragmentary and confused acquaintance with astronomy had been organized by a wonderful lecturer, Pavel Prihoda, who was able to teach us comprehensively even such difficult matters as spherical coordinates. He went through the mistakes in our tests and according to them he tried to explain in a more explicit way everything what slipped from our grasp. He was surely the best teacher I was lucky to meet.
The first idea for the astronomical drawing The Way the Stars Live, came as usual from above, but when we looked for the right place to create it, I immediately thought of the Prague Planetarium. I was very glad, that the curator Marcel Grün had been enthusiastic about my work and we started to make up a mutual project titled "With colored pencils towards the universe." He offered me a room for the exhibition following my public drawing.
I planned the first outdoor public drawing for the expected first warm spring days. Warm weather brought many visitors to Stromovka park and because this park also became the main spot for election campaigns of many political parties, my audience was extended by very peculiar characters, sometimes smeared with mustard from complimentary barbecue and goulash. At least we knew what we were going to get for free at each party headquarters if we promised to vote for them.
Among my regular visitors I noticed a very clever boy, who was only in the second grade, but already had astronomical facts at his fingertips. He was also a wizard mathematician. He did not have any problems with counting how many A4 formats you can put in A0 format--a small genius. I was very surprised when his mother told me, that he had serious problems in school because of his singularity. He was, believe it or not, examined by a psychiatrist before his mother managed to find a school where his talent would be appreciated as a gift, not abhorred as a deviation.
In the drawing The Way the Stars Live you will find many evolutionary stages of stars, the newly born star-babies as well as old white dwarfs. Those who are learned in astronomy will recognize the well known HD diagram of correlation between luminosity and temperature of the stars. But that was only a tease for the scientists. For all the others this drawing became a symbol that the stars live their lives like us, even though much longer.
After a long time I decided to visit places in Stromovka park that were ruined by the devastating flood in 2002. Stromovka was my favorite childhood place to visit; I knew every tree and every hiding place. Some trees under Slechtovka restaurant were missing, there was no trace of the once beautiful rose garden, but surprisingly, I got maybe the last chance to say good-bye to my beloved statue of lovers, a concrete sculpture, now in ruins. The boy was now without his head, but after all, the lovers seemed to dwell in their embrace in social-realistic style forever, even though the huge tree, that used to put a romantic shadow over their love, was taken by the great flood.
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