Jakub Milčák
Bio: Born in Levoča, Slovakia, Jakub Milčák currently lives in New York and Halifax, Nova Scotia. He devotes his time to painting, writing, and illustrating books. He also translates American and British poetry into Slovak. In 2012, he established a small publishing house named Shift Fox Press.
Thesis Exhibition
Artist Statement:
What is your relationship with children's drawings?
It’s their stubborn simplicity and levity while dealing with something complex. Outer space, family, and animals are my favorite themes in children’s drawings. They are not afraid of not knowing. It may seem that they embrace this feeling. Not knowing does not weigh them down. Most importantly it’s their insistence that what they draw exists and is real. They believe it, an imagination that grounds gravity. I approach abstraction as creating something real that carries parts and pieces of the known, ambiguous parts that prompt to some recognition while giving them different rules of existence.
Which painters are influences in your work?
There were few painters who created a world to which I felt so close at certain times of my life. I was so fascinated by them; I would paint exactly like them. When I was 16 or 17 I would paint so similarly to Georg Baselitz that you would not know the difference. The same happened when I saw paintings of Antoni Tapies or the works of Pierre Alechinsky. You are always finding yourself through others.
One word.
Missing