Certainly, the museum was filled with beautiful, colourful, dark, intense, and simple art. Through it all, I kept coming back to one; Storm by Julius Mařak. It was big, imposing, and the desperation of it enticed me. Mařak chose nature as his landscape and he showed its fickleness and danger in black, white and grey. Trees were flying, their roots visible, and they were mixing up in the sky until one could not know where one ended and the other one began.  

My eyes would and could not stop looking at the man running from the storm, his head turned looking back to see how close the consuming darkness was. I could almost hear his heavy yet hopeful breathing, praying for an escape route, for a chance. But the doom was inevitable. He could not run far or fast enough to leave the destruction behind; it came from every side. He was frozen in time, one step away from destruction.

Even though the mood of the painting was dark, and it would never change, after a while my mind repeated in echoes, like a chant: No storm can last forever, no storm can last forever. Something clicked and shifted inside my mind in that moment. My focus for this project are women who have lived traumatic experiences, who have been beaten up by life, who could not hide from the unforgiving storm. These women were consumed by darkness until a small ray of hope penetrated the wild clouds because rain is not permanent. It is not. Life is not an unchangeable painting.  

Storm by Julius Mařak portrays the women’s past. My project portrays their present and future. I will do my best to honour that and make them justice.

–Magpie