Ida Vaculková Čermáková - I Saw a Little Deer

5 Dec 2016 – 2 Jan 2017

This exhibition is taking place at the Art Archive as part of the Polička/Shelf project.
The last Polička/Shelf of this year is devoted to the sketchbooks of Ida Čermáková, a seven-year-old girl who in adulthood became painter and ceramic artist Ida Vaculková, which was something that at the time the sketchbooks were created no one could suspect.
Back then, the two school exercise books weren’t anything exceptional. Ida drew in them in Grade 2 of elementary girls’ school in Uherské Hradiště. The year was 1927. In both exercise books, the little girl recorded her immediate surroundings. Her home, the way to school, her mother cooking dinner, pots and pans, but also for example a fairy tale about Smolíček, a boy who lives with a deer. The drawings are of things as ordinary as a steam locomotive, a tile stove, chopping wood, or encountering a wagon driver.
Ida Čermáková completed her drawings without exceptions, and often also captioned them. Her world is complete and has order – and not in and of itself. This order is for one the work of childhood, for which the entire world is home and home the entire world. And partly perhaps back then this already entailed the formation of a future artist, who is trying to grasp her surroundings by drawing.
Later, the author of the exhibited sketchbooks devoted herself to drawing more and more, and in 1939 registered at Czech Technical University in Prague to study drawing and art education at the studio of Oldřich Blažíček and Cyril Bouda.  But the university was closed that same year, and after returning to Uherské Hradiště the young painter married ceramic and fine artist Vladimír Vaculka, through whom she also first became acquainted with ceramics and began making her own first works.