By Jiri Tibor Novak
watercolour on paper
image size: 15.5x55cm
frame size: 35x74cm
$1,750
ARTIST STATEMENT + BIO
Jiri Tibor Novak (1947 – 2021) was an artist and writer born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, where he worked as typographer for newspaper and attended art school. After the Russian invasion of his country in 1968, he immigrated to Australia in 1970 on board the passenger ship Achille Lauro. His lack of English made early communication difficult and he had a series of unsatisfying jobs - working on the Melbourne trams as ticket collector, and driving taxis. He worked this out through his art (he spent most of his free time on it) while developing his contacts and collaborators. He began supplying designs and illustrations to student magazines and theatre groups at Monash University, and contributing cartoons to the literary quarterly Overland.
In 1973 he left for a working tour of Europe and North America, and painted and designed his way from Taormina in Sicily to Toronto in Canada. Back in Australia in 1975, he got a job at LaTrobe University which aligned with his trade (book illustration/ layout artist/ graphic design) and access to equipment (cameras, presses) and supplies that allowed him to indulge his creative inclination.
He was active as a book illustrator, winning a series of awards and international recognitions. In 1999 he launched a position of part-time teacher at The Gordon TAFE in Geelong, teaching art and design until 2017. In parallel he continued his busy artist’s life of drawing, painting and printmaking, with exhibitions across Australia and in his home country, the Czech Republic.
Jiri was really a full-time artist; regardless of his circumstances, he kept creating. He had to have a pencil in his hands. He constantly changed the "look" or artistic approach/ technique, perhaps more than the subject matter. His work is an obsession with creating, repetition of objects and themes, landscapes and contrast within and between them. He put his fascination for landscape down to his experience as a European migrant living in the very different physical surroundings of Australia: “The landscape here is open-space with this incredibly huge sky, while Europe is more closed, very chamber-like”.