An American in Kosice

by James Murray

When I was in art school I had a series of plans: live here for a summer, study there for a semester, and so on.   And after two years, when my plans ended, I became depressed.   So, during my last year of school, I constructed another one - something I could hold on to and strive for - not simple or easy, but possible. The plan was to work in New York City for a year after graduating. I would save as much money as possible, then move to Prague and spend a year there and paint. Of course, getting work was not easy in 1992, the worst part of the recession, but I found a job, doing display design for Bergdorf Goodman.   I had the luck of a $400 per month sublet and made the first and most tedious part of my plan happen.

Why move to Prague? I asked myself over and over. I had been there a few years earlier and loved it. It was a fresh and surreal place, where every corner held a new or unusual surprise in its shadows. I had been painting diligently in my apartment over the past few years during art school (when my own work competed for time with my school assignments), and continued to do so after graduation.

But I wanted something that would help me understand why I wanted to paint, why I felt I could be an artist, why I had to be. I was working toward something, but exactly what remained a mystery. I only knew that I had to paint. My work was incongruent, which was my largest frustration. I thought if I could have a year to focus, I might be able to make sense of all the different things I was attempting.   Maybe I'd pull them together, I hoped, or maybe let something dominate. I wasn't sure what would happen, but I needed time. Time to work without the interruptions and distractions of New York City, where my life was.

I thought an answer might be in Prague. I arrived and realized that, as much as I loved it, I didn't want to be there. I was disappointed that there were so many Americans there already.   In the two years I had been away, the city had become the most common destination for young Americans. I was torn; I loved Prague but not the "Little America" it had become. The culture of the post-collegiate Americans in Prague focused more on where you could get a beer for less than fifteen crowns than on the experience, the people, the culture, and landscape. I'm not against cheap drinks or traveling Americans, but I needed the distance from America that Prague no longer offered.

Kosice, Slovakia, 1994. All images courtesy of the author.

I went East, and a day's trip from Prague I found a city, equidistant from Krakow and Budapest, tucked between two mountain ranges. Kosice is the largest city in East Slovakia. I chose it because after four hours of walking around I hadn't found one person who spoke English. I thought: This is the place - not as beautiful as Prague, but charming, still. I would have to struggle to learn some of the language, and I was more likely to meet natives than in Prague, where it was too easy to hear and speak English.

The experience of living away from people and places I knew well gave me a new perspective. What had seemed important in New York shifted. Now everything was at an equal distance:   things that were in my face in New York receded, and things I hadn't had time for edged closer. The important people, places, and events in life became evident.   I felt as if I were looking at a schematic drawing of a life that had been distorted by a skewed visual perspective.

Kosice, Slovakia, 1994.

Living in Kosice was one of the biggest influences on my life to date. The life I led there was enough to affect my art and my writing - at the time I was writing as much as painting, due to a compulsive need to write my friends letters of five or ten pages or more. I hadn't studied studio art in school at Parsons; I had felt the need to get a more conservative education, and so had studied illustration. This gave me the tools and skills to be any kind of artist I felt I wanted to be.   But I hadn't found my language yet, and my work was all over the place. Some pieces were tightly painted figures and others were abstract relational paintings.

The challenge in Kosice was to get started: find a place to live and meet people. By some stroke of luck, I landed my first apartment within two days. Finding the art supply shop was more difficult, and knowing what I was buying was a confusing and frustrating   experience. Some materials were simple to figure out: Turpintinovy was turpentine.   But canvas was platno, paint was farba. I met an older woman who was an Anglophile,   and, in fact, I had to ask her if she was Slovak or English. Most of the English that I had come across was spoken poorly and with the thickest accent. Marianna had been to England and even had pictures of herself with the Queen. She introduced me to her friends - all older people - who were Doctors of Architecture and heads of departments in the universities there. Through them I was able to gain some understanding of the language regarding materials and quickly started making my artwork.

I had come with impressions of Henry Miller's Paris and Milan Kundera's Prague, although I knew that those days of romance were gone. Travel had become so simple. Unlike Miller, I flew to Europe in only hours and, unlike Kundera, was free to travel anywhere I felt comfortable. I knew there would never be the power in my travels that those artists of the past had found simply by their sheer courage: to live differently in a world that was simpler and yet more hostile, more volatile and unpredictable than the world I grew up in. This would be the closest I could get, to be in a country that was in the process of breaking in two.

The political instability was evident after a few months. News of kidnappings and cars being blown up in Bratislava (the capital) was common. There were street assassinations - at one point, four during one week in Kosice. At the time, Yugoslavia was in the worst part of its war and there were at least four powerful mafias struggling for power in Kosice, a major crossroads for international trade. I felt the concern of Slovak friends who lived there, but was never directly affected, beyond losing a few favorite restaurants suddenly closed by arson or other violent means.

Jim Murray, Gabriel, 1994. Acrylic on canvas, 25 x 30 cm. Photo by the artist.

One quiet August night a friend and I were walking into town after I had painted his portrait, and  in several spots on the streets and sidewalks there were flowers and burning candles. After seeing the fourth or fifth such setting, I asked what they were for and, with disbelief at my ignorance, my friend told me each marked a place where Russians killed someone during the invasion of 1968. It was the 25th anniversary.   Suddenly, a history that seemed so distant became immediate. Family and friends of those who died during an invasion of their country had laid these candles and flowers. In that moment, I could envision a city very different from the one   I was used to.

Thoughts of that night came back to me as I sat talking to an old Hungarian man at breakfast one morning. Kosice had been Hungarian before the Treaty of Versailles disassembled the Austro-Hungarian Empire and shrunk Hungary by at least a third. He was very old and told me, in a Slovak probably as broken as mine was, that he had seen the Nazis come and go; he had seen the Russians come and go; he had seen the Communists rule and then go. Just to think he had lived that life, I knew I was a foreigner. After all, what did an American know of these things, besides  reading about them?

The first month I was there I met a few English teachers from Britain and within a week of meeting, we went for drinks. After the first bar, we went to one where the entire ex-pat community was having a night out. Eight or more people sat at a table. We walked in and everyone knew Richard and Steve. Most were English, but there were a few Canadians and a couple of Americans. It was comforting to know I wasn't the only one there, but I was made to feel very conspicuous when I walked in and everyone knew my name and who I was. "Oh you're Jim, the artist from New York." It took me off guard. Later, I came to understand that this was the only and entire circle of native-English-speaking ex-pats in the city. And, being such a small group, it meant that everyone knew everything about each other immediately. I was amused the next time, when it happened to an American couple who had moved from the US to teach there. They were just as overwhelmed as I had been.

Jim Murray, Pivaren, 1994. Acrylic on canvas, 30 x 20 cm.. Photo by the author.

I was lucky to be one of a few foreigners in Kosice; it came with a certain influence I never expected. I was soon friendly with some of the most famous artists in the country and several teachers at the biggest art school in the region. I had the experience in New York of trading weekly critiques with artist friends. In Kosice, the artist-to-artist relation was more ephemeral. We didn't critique as we had in New York. It wasn't less valuable, but it was more about simple encouragement than critical analysis;   more a concern with why something was done than how to make it better. It seemed more spiritual, as if we were all just spirits trying to speak to each other through our visual language.

Maybe this had something to do with the lack of a market for art in a country where an average salary   then hovered somewhere above three thousand dollars per year. I   think because none of the artists sold much of their art to private collectors, it was easier to be less analytical and more spiritual about the work. The work I saw ranged from completely conceptual to simpler, figurative works of art.   The creativity was infectious, and I wish I had spent more time and gotten more of that sensibility. I learned to look less critically and more appreciatively at works I normally would have dismissed. I did wish, in some way, that there had been another Western artist around to discuss this with, but there was not. I never met another American artist the entire time I lived in Kosice.

Jim Murray: Portrait of Jan Mathe, 1994. Clay, 36 x 12 x 12 inches. Photos by the artist.	Jim Murray: Portrait of Jan Mathe, 1994. Clay, 36 x 12 x 12 inches. Photos by the artist.

After six or eight months I was introduced to Jan Mathe, an elderly artist who took me on as a student.   I met him twice a week at his studio and he gave me lessons on figurative sculpture. It was something I hadn't had the opportunity to work on in school. Although I haven't yet brought sculpture into my body of work, I learned things about painting from his lessons. He was hard of hearing and didn't speak English, so communicating was always a challenge, and he was the kind of teacher who would get angry at my misunderstandings and failures. It was an intense relationship, and although I didn't like all of his work or relate to much of it, his sculptures were what could be described as Henry Moores with wings. Not that his work had wings, but each piece felt as if it was in mid-flight or about to take off. Their simplicity was their strength. He was maybe the first fully evolved artist who had taken me into his studio, and seeing how he worked and what he had done was inspiring. His sculptures were on public display in the squares of towns and cities throughout Czechoslovakia.

I was lucky to have met people who have remained my friends - not all artists, some were students or musicians or professionals of some sort. Kosice was an unusual metropolis, home to people from other European countries and Africa. Often the African students were my best teachers of the language. They had come for a degree, but before they could take the entrance exam, each spent a year studying Slovak. Then they took an exam, for engineering or medicine, in Slovak, competing with Slovakian students who had spent the past year preparing for the exam.

Two friends, Kosice, 1994. Photo by the author.

My life became a rotating routine of spending time in the bars at night learning to speak Slovak over drinks and roaming the streets or local villages during the day. After that, when I felt I hadn't been working, I would cloister myself for a week or two and not see anyone, spending days and nights painting, drawing, writing, and studying Slovak. It was difficult after these solitary times to venture out again. It was as if I had left humanity and wasn't invited back. It took a strange sort of courage to walk into a bar or stop by a friend's house afterwards.

It's funny: I don't think much about the artwork I did while I was in Kosice, but I was prolific, and in the last few months I discovered what I had been looking for. I found the direction I would continue to work toward and can still see in my current work. It happened after a night out drinking with the Africans and English until somewhere around 4:00 a.m. The next morning, I couldn't sleep, and not wanting to risk destroying one of the paintings I had begun in the studio, I went into the yard and started throwing paint on a canvas. It was just something to do, a practice piece. I thought I'd paint a landscape, and so I did. But afterward, looking at it, everything came into place. It wasn't just landscape. I could see all the concepts I had been struggling with. It felt like a miracle. I wasn't even trying to find it in that painting, but there it was. Chaos and order worked in harmony, to form an image. The elements didn't repeat and, yet, formed patterns.

Jim Murray, Barce, 1994. Oil on canvas, 22 x 18". Photo by the author.

It was the beginning of   a long journey that I'm still taking. After that morning, I destroyed many or most of my previous works. Some still exist but too few to make sense of what I had been doing.   They all seem so incompatible. I wouldn't now show the ones that survived, even though some are successful in themselves. They are like photographs of a place and time for me, as are the many sketchbooks that I filled while I was there.   They feel like relics, even though it has been only six years since I came back from Kosice.

Upon my return to New York City, I knew I'd have to find work and looked without much diligence. There was one possible job I eventually got after I'd been home for three weeks. Before that I spent all my days painting the new beginning I had found in the last months in Slovakia. Good thing, because once I started working for Bloomberg Television, I had little time to paint for years to come. I struggled, but always felt as if I was failing at being an artist by having a job that was so consuming. Eventually, I built a life that was more giving to my work. It took years, but now, again,  I am painting as much as I had been in Slovakia.

About the Author:

Jim Murray is a painter   living and working in New York City. Through 17 June, an exhibition of his paintings  can be seen at Markham-Murray Gallery in New York City's Tribeca. It is the gallery's   final exhibition; also its director, the artist has decided to close the gallery to permit more time for painting.

Resources:

The Markham-Murray Gallery website can be found at http://www.markham-murray.com   

In a previous issue of   the Arts4All Newsletter, Anna Roxas wrote about Paint Club, an exhibition/event at the gallery this spring.