Shortly after the Velvet Revolution I was in Prague.  The owner of a gallery noticed me lingering over the work of Jiri David, who apparently lived just down the street. Without asking me, someone was sent to retrieve the artist.

It was an uncomfortable encounter for each of us. I spoke no Czech and his English was rudimentary. Both of us are shy. Jiri is only 13 months younger than me, but what profoundly differently lives.

I purchased four works on paper.  Two are dated 1981, I expect the others are also of this period.  He has since moved on to much more ambitious installations, sculpture, and photography.

As I have mounted my own recent work near his, I wonder how twenty years of living with Jiri's youthful perspective has influenced my own.  There is, it seems to me, a remarkable compatibility.  In the photo at the left Jiri's is the larger work.

In 1991 Jiri David wrote of the role of "Lyric Pathology" in art:

It is a lucid, and inevitably chosen solitude, riding on a well prepared boat, floating over erupting depths of eroticism, when the only possible reflection on the surface is one's own blood dispersed on the water.  What you can see in that reflection reminds you of beings from heaven and hell, flying skyward, so close together that you can hardly distinguish one from the other.