Lucie Jenišová (LuciPrints) is a visual artist specializing in printmaking, primarily linocuts, as well as painting and drawing. Although she studied horticulture, she has never worked in the field. It was during her maternity leave that she returned to creating art and discovered a passion for linocut. She runs an Etsy shop where she sells her prints and is currently working to become more involved in the art world beyond the internet. In September, she will be participating in the Open Art Fest in Prague. @luciprints
How has your background in the Czech Republic contributed to your artistic identity? I was born and raised near Prague in the Czech Republic. I moved around a lot, but I was always close to nature. I always preferred nature to the city. My work is inspired by the nature I know, the nature that is within my reach. Sometimes I find the most common things to be the most beautiful.
When did you first fall in love with art and realize you wanted to be an artist? For you, what is the importance of the arts? I have enjoyed drawing and creating since childhood. I admired my father, who is a painter. One of the most powerful moments for me was seeing an exhibition of works by Zdeněk Burian when I was about 13 years old. I stared at one sketch, and the pencil work, so simple and yet so mature, sent shivers down my spine. I admired the skill, but at that time it reinforced my belief that I would have to be a genius, otherwise there is no point of trying. I drew occasionally for fun, but without any great ambition. My path to art has been a winding one, but the more I devote myself to it in recent years, the more my passion grows.
The importance of art is so broad and constantly changing in the context of history that it is difficult to answer briefly. Today, I would say that it is food for the soul, but how we feel and what we feel also affects the whole body. It speaks a universal language and speaks directly to you. It can evoke familiar emotions, but also things we have not been aware of, and it can touch on something deeper behind them.
What does your typical day in the studio look like? Walk us through your studio and your most used materials and tools. My studio is my home. My materials are scattered throughout the house. Although I am somewhat chaotic and like to experiment with new techniques, the process behind creating a piece is usually very similar. First, I develop an idea and create a sketch. Then, I cut a block or more from a roll of linoleum. I have different types of linoleum because each is better suited to different things. Then I transfer the drawing to the blocks or draw directly on them if I'm feeling brave. Carving the block is my favourite part of the process, along with drawing or painting the sketch. Once the block is carved, I cut the paper for printing and prepare the press. Over the years, I have learned a lot and tweaked many things to make the whole process easier. I love it when I come up with a simple solution that solves a problem, but I also hate it when I realise that something so simple didn't occur to me much earlier. After printing, which is the part where most things go wrong for me, especially when I use more colours, I hang the prints to dry. I love seeing multiple almost identical pictures hanging beside each other. It's such a magical moment. Also, printing the first proof is a magical moment. You have an idea of what you will get, but exactly what it will look like is always a surprise.
What projects are you at work on at the moment? And what themes or ideas are currently driving your work? I usually have several ideas at once, or projects in progress. I finish some, abandon others. Ideas driving my work are always things around me that I love and that make me feel peaceful, nature, and animals. Right now, I am working on small paintings that I can squeeze in between time with my family. Last few months, I have carried a sketchbook everywhere I go. I am planning to do more plein air work and transfer that to linocuts. I have successfully cooked burnt plate oil, which I cannot buy here, and I can't wait to start experimenting with translucent layers in linocuts.
What do you hope people feel when they experience your art? What are you trying to express? I hope that they will experience uplifting feelings and pause for reflection. Through my work, I also want to gradually convey the feeling of space, silence, and beautiful emptiness when the mind is quiet. These moments are pivotal in my life, helping me to deal with my own limitations and insecurities so that they do not overshadow the beauty that life gives me every day.
Which artists, past or present, would you like to meet? And why? Most of the time, I feel that the work of artists I admire says everything, and I don't feel the need for any dialogue outside the dialogue with the art. But what I would often and very much like to do is travel through time and watch artists at work. Without interruption. My favorites include Zdeněk Burian, Alfons Mucha, Max Švabinský, Joaquín Sorolla, Oscar Droege, Norbertine Bresslern-Roth, Van Gogh, and more. From among living artists, I adore Nicholas V Sanchez, Anya Barabanova, Zdeněk Daněk, and many others. The list grows every day.
Do you draw inspiration from music, art, or other disciplines? I think inspiration is all around us. Once you open yourself up to it, you will find inspiration in everything. Nature, culture, music, literature, movies, and your everyday life — it's all around you. For me, inspiration is usually a fleeting moment, a vague idea or a direction, or a specific effect, but without a composition or a story. Sometimes I have an idea or story, but I struggle to translate it into a visual language. The hard work lies in filtering ideas, developing them, and successfully translating them into an image. In recent years, I have mostly focused on the fundamentals of the craft, improving my drawing, carving, and colour understanding skills. Now, I am trying to work more with all the other aspects: composition, story, colours, simplification, and expressing what is important to me. There is so much to consider that it can be overwhelming, and then creative block sets in. This is mostly due to my uncertainty about which inspiration is worthwhile and which is not. The inner judge that questions whether everything is good enough hinders inspiration the most.
A great thing about living in The Czech Republic is… I am glad that I live in a small town within easy reach of Prague, where everything is available, but at the same time close to nature. The older I get, the further away from the city I could be. If I woke up in the morning surrounded by a river or lake, forest, meadows, and marshes, it would be a dream come true.
Tell us about important teachers/mentors/collaborators in your life. My first inspiration was my father, who paints. Then, after maternity leave, I managed to find a job in a stucco studio run by academic painters. It was a real blessing for me, and during that time, I absorbed a lot of valuable information and found the direction I wanted to take.
Sustainability in the art world is an important issue. Can you share a memory or reflection about the beauty and wonder of the natural world? Does being in nature inspire your art or your process? Being in nature not only inspires me, but it is increasingly becoming a necessity, it is therapy, it is wonderful. And I often think about what a shame it is that nature is constantly being deprived of space and polluted with waste. It is a clash between ignorance and indifference on the one hand, and extreme activism on the other, which is rife with hypocrisy. But if you look closely, you will find that there are many people and many projects that are restoring natural biomes, helping quietly and persistently, and I think that the number of these people is growing, which makes me optimistic. I am speaking from my own experience here, where I live. On a global scale, we can only believe that nature is more powerful than we think and that there is still time for things to gradually change for the better. Everyone can start with themselves and locally, which makes the most sense.
AI is changing everything - the way we see the world, creativity, art, our ideas of beauty and the way we communicate with each other and our imaginations. What are your reflections about AI and technology? What is the importance of human art and handmade creative works over industrialized creative practices? AI shows how fake the internet has been for a long time, and now it's reaching a new level, and I don't even want to think about how much it can manipulate people. For me personally, AI is not a threat. I love traditional techniques and real materials. AI only exists in your phone or computer. When you turn them off, there is no AI around you with a paintbrush. So far, I can recognize an AI image at first glance, although this is changing every day, and it is possible that I am already wrong. But basically, it is a challenge to be more in the real world. Not believing everything on the internet will now be an absolute necessity. Unfortunately, what AI has brought to the creative sphere so far is, for example, when you order a postcard from Ježíšek (the Czech equivalent of Santa Claus), you get an AI postcard, an innocent-looking image at first glance, but one that looks like a horror scene when you look at it closely. It made me feel sick. As a child, I used to look intently at the details of illustrations in children's books, and the idea that our children and we will be more and more surrounded by this artificial ugliness is terrible. And I'm not even talking about AI ads on TV. The media and institutions are losing their already weak standards because it's cheaper, and that's unfortunate. But I am convinced that this is a wave that will peak and ultimately make handcrafted work all the more valuable. AI has no character, and above all, no courage; it cannot experiment. It is simply an algorithm that churns out generative content that is polished and very artificial. You may not know exactly what bothers you about it, but you can tell that something is wrong. I hope that people are not so numb and that decadence has its limits.
Exploring ideas, art and the creative process connects me to… life itself.
