Old Town Square for the Second Time (or) the Aviator with a Shovel in His Hand

Artist Marie Brozova's recollections of her second drawing event in the Old Town Square in Prague.

The second Defense of Colored Pencils in Prague's Old Town Square was meant as a retrospective, after more than a year of the project in the Czech Republic. The weather was set fair and provided us two successful days for a show of public drawing. I worked on the drawing titled “The Sea of Silence”.

People passing by often knew my project from the media and they were intrigued to see with their own eyes, what can be created with the humble colored pencils their children and grandchildren use. Not until then did I realize that my project has come a long way.

I lookied forward to meeting my friend Yuri, an ultralight airplane aviator, who lost his job in Ukraine (he was found obsolete in the process of minimizing the staff of their army). After fifteen years in service he didn’t know what to do to feed his children. He ended up in the Czech Republic, in the middle of a xenophobic workmen crew, with a shovel in his hand as a construction worker. When he felt really bad under pressure of dirty jokes and obscene gestures, he talked to himself: Wait, you miserable idiots, one day I will write a book about you.

I met him eight years later, when he was promoted to a better post – he worked as a shop assistant at a kiosk with souvenirs, from ten a.m. to eight p.m. everyday, without weekends off. That’s what capitalism is. You don’t want your job? You don’t have to work. There are ten others waiting for it.

Every time I see him, there is a smile on his face. The adversity didn’t make him bitter. He only shrugged his shoulders and looked at the sky. Well, they up above, they know what they are doing. And even if they don’t know, what can we do about it all?

He pressed me to go to Russia with my project. Russian people would understand my drawings better, that’s for sure. He told me they were more emotional, not a bit ashamed to express their feeling. Czech people he sees as hypocrites, afraid of everything one might think about them. Naivety is regarded as a quality in Russia, as a purity of the human soul. In the Czech Republic he found that being naive means to be dumb.

Yuri is not ashamed for his naivety. When he found out that my great-grandfather had been born in the same city as him, he burst into tears and brought me his passport as the evidence. He seemed to believe, that they up above know what they are doing after all.