CURRICULUM VITAE

I was born when the great world crisis started. My father stood next to the bed, an unemployed lithograph. They say I came into the world head first and the umbilical cord was a bit wrapped around my neck. The unemployment benefit was enough only for three kilos and 750 grams, but I was still there. Since then May sixth become a holiday for everyone in my family except me.

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In 1933, a smiling nun made me a human being. She made me understand that it's not a tragedy to come into the world head first and also convinced me to go to the Bakats Square elementary school for four years. This all happened on Ráday Street.

At the age of 8, I met my first love, and also art, whose name was Antal Fery, he was a young graphic artist. I was already curious and talkative back then, so in order to get rid of me, he gave me a brush, hoping that I will stop talking and asking things - but from then on I painted and talked while painting.

At first, I copied prints from a magazine printed on very high-quality glossy, glazed paper. Later at Évike`s request, I conjured up Flemish-style peaked farmhouses with a perspective view at the center of several hundred white sheets of paper. By 1940 I had already grown tired of the prints. Nevertheless, also World War II broke out.

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I  went to the Budapest Eötvös József Gymnasium in 1942. Because my literature teacher was called up for military service,  I never became a novelist. The reason why it didn't happen was that his successor, Mr. Simon, did not like the way how I wrote my homework in a "detailed and colorful" way. This is still what my friends, conversationalists, and lexicon editors dislike about me.

At the end of the war, at the age of 15, a Soviet sergeant pressed a machine gun to my head, but the weapon didn't work. 

 

From then on, events started to unfold quickly. After a very weak high school diploma in 1948, Mr. Maronyák Csáky, to my greatest surprise, admitted me to the evening drawing school of the Szépmíves Lyceum. He never forgave me for wanting to learn to draw without having a drawing board, paper, or charcoal. But I learned anyway.

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My quiet master at the university, Miháltz Pál, played a big role in my life, he managed to bring out something in me.

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Then came the music, which I never played but always listened to. I already had a microgroove record player when microgroove record players didn't even exist. I started with Bolero and ended with Webern last night.

 

I found myself when instead of staying a graphic designer, Hály Károly and Oláh Gusztáv convinced me to be a set designer. I became an apprentice at the Opera House, and a scholarship holder at the Hungarian People's Army Theater.I was happy because everything I loved was together, words, music, and dance, and I could paint big backgrounds for myself and others.

 

In 1956 I got into a little trouble in Eger, although I wasn't there, but it was the way of the things back then. Someone started shooting at the Lyceum wall - they say it was me, that was the communist era. So in 1957, I was left without a contract, with a young family, which again brought me back to graphics and writing.

 

However, I quickly forgot about Eger and almost lost a dream when Mágori Erzsébet introduced me to a group where I was spending my evening with people like Jékely Zoltán, Pilinszky János, Rubin Szilárd, Mensáros László, Sarkadi Imre every Thursday. This was good. I painted again, I discovered that my self-portrait and the representation of the world make me human. I saw that all living beings can dance, sing, mimic, weave, build, and destroy, but only humans can make a picture that they carry in their imagination first.

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Then theaters, plays, operas, and television dramas came in long rows. Sometimes I painted too little, sometimes too much, and in the meantime, there were revolutions and counter-revolutions: Kaposvári Csiky Gergely Theater, marriages, Miskolc National Theater, József Attila Theater, television, and the Kádár regime, then the regime change, retirement, and exhibitions, and more and more pictures in the world, and fewer and fewer people in the pictures and among people.

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Today I comfort myself that if I can paint a person, they are much more beautiful than a yellow square, and Mona Lisa´s smile on canvas says more than the most sophisticated performance. I've tried both, but let's leave the reasoning to the judges and philosophers. They can explain the world better than I can, but I know that a picture painted with love is worth more than any explanation.

You can find all the other non-important details on me in lexicons and on Wikipedia.

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2002