Imagined Worlds in Color

Some places exist only because other places have lived inside us.

I first imagined this landscape while living in Southern California, at the edge of the desert and surrounded by high, rugged mountains. At the same time, I was carrying memories of my other home in Central Europe — its rolling hills, old towns and layers of history.

The contrast between those two worlds never stopped fascinating me. I wanted my Californian friends to understand something of the Europe I knew, and my Czech family to see something of my new world in California. But I wasn't consciously thinking about any of that when I painted. I simply created a place that somehow contained it all.

Years later I returned to the idea. The original watercolor had been sold, and this became its second life as a digital painting. By then I was comfortable with my mosaic style, building an image from individual painted shapes over a unifying background, and I had been painting mostly real places. Creating an imaginary world again felt like a small adventure.

At the time, I wasn't painting toward any particular goal. I simply let the image become whatever it wanted to be.

For its colors, I travelled somewhere else entirely. I chose a palette from an abstract drawing I had made years earlier in Greece. Three different places, three different periods of my life, quietly found their way into one landscape.

Perhaps that is why Where Summer Leads feels less like a particular destination and more like somewhere waiting to be explored. A road winds through the hills. Tiny towns appear in the valleys. There are mountains to climb and places in the distance that we can never quite see.

I like to imagine that the journey continues beyond the edge of the painting.

For me, this is a world made from memory, color and imagination — somewhere that doesn't exist, but that I would very much like to visit.

You might ask me, why “blooming”? And you’d be completely right—there are no flowers in the picture. But their colors are there. This fantasy city arose spontaneously, like all my mischievous cities, but the colors—I chose them carefully. That’s what really matters. And where did those “flowers” come from? From the California desert, when it blooms sometimes in the spring, after a rainy winter. Mainly there are yellow poppies, but also lots of other brightly colored flowers. And when that happens in the California desert, many people go to see the flowers. I went too, photographed them, and used them.

A safari palette and my usual shapes. It wasn’t until it was finished that it became clear what it could be. Who else would sit on this but a clown?