It Is Important to Respect the Person I Was Twenty Years Ago

György Verebes, a Munkácsy Prize-winning painter and Artist of Merit, has been the artistic director of the Szolnok Artists’ Colony since 2003. Alongside his independent artistic practice, he has also played an outstanding role as an organiser of cultural and artistic life. In early April, an exhibition of his latest series, Soma Sema, opened at the Széphárom Community Space. On this occasion, we spoke about the main stages of his artistic career and his new cycle of paintings.

Ágnes Képiró: You were born into a family of medical professionals, the son of two doctors. How did your path lead you towards art?

György Verebes: Drawing was a passion from a very early age. No one in the family practised visual art professionally. Not only my parents but also my grandparents were doctors, so everything seemed to point naturally towards a medical career. My father made a very gentle attempt to steer me in that direction. It is a beautiful and highly respectable profession, but I never felt any elemental attraction to it. Neither my brother nor I ever really imagined ourselves becoming doctors.

That was probably due above all to our creative inclinations. There was both musical and visual talent in the family, even though no one pursued either professionally. In us, however, those tendencies came to the fore, and we ultimately found our way into the humanities and the arts.

Ágnes Képiró: If I understand correctly, you grew up in an open environment that encouraged broad general knowledge.

György Verebes: Absolutely. I grew up surrounded by a library of several thousand volumes, and my brother and I were given a kind of basic training in all sorts of fields from childhood onwards. It provided fertile ground from which it was easy both to draw nourishment and to take off in new directions. I still make use of it today.

Ágnes Képiró: Do you remember the first time you felt that the visual arts were your path?

György Verebes: I was one of those children who were always drawing. I won every drawing competition there was, even though I behaved in a rather unconventional way in art classes. But it was completely obvious to me that this was something I could do.

I had already decided then that this was what I would do, because I felt it was what I was meant to do. By secondary school I was already exhibiting with local amateur art associations, although I had no formal artistic training whatsoever because I attended a science-oriented secondary school specialising in chemistry.

In my hometown, Senta, that was the closest thing at the time to a traditional grammar-school education, because when I was at secondary school there was no grammar school there. I received a very strong education in the sciences, and that way of thinking later proved useful as well. It awakened in me a need to see things as a whole and gave me a sense of method.

After my final examinations, for example, I was automatically admitted to the Faculty of Chemical Technology at the University of Novi Sad. I never took up that place, because the pull of art was stronger.

Ágnes Képiró: Why did you come to Hungary to study art?

György Verebes: I graduated from secondary school in 1984, and after that I completed a year of military service in the former Yugoslavia. My mother had always been aware that there was something artistic stirring in me, and my parents wanted to ask someone whether I was talented enough.

They approached an artist they knew, the graphic artist Tamás Kovács. He directed them to the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts, where József Somogyi was rector at the time.

“I’m afraid I have bad news, sir. Unfortunately, your son is talented,” he told my father.

On the basis of the drawings my parents had shown him, he treated the first week of the entrance examination as already completed and told me that once I had finished my military service, I should come to Budapest in September and complete the programme for the second week of the entrance examination.

And that is exactly what happened. After I was discharged, I travelled to Budapest and spent a long weekend at the Academy, working alone from morning until evening to complete the second week of the entrance examination. By the middle of the following week, the result was in: I had been admitted to the graphic arts department.

My first year was full of doubt and struggle, because I had never drawn from a live model before. Towards the end of that first year I began to feel that perhaps this was not my path after all, because I had entered a professional environment in which I could no longer achieve the standard I had previously expected of myself.

Ágnes Képiró: If I am right, your teachers and fellow students must have played an important role in dispelling those doubts.

György Verebes: In my first year my teacher was Alajos Eszik, and in my second year Gábor Nagy. It was from the latter that I received my first top mark for professional work in my second year. His comment was that there was not enough of it in quantitative terms, but that if I continued in this way, it would be good.

That was when it was finally settled for me that I did have a place in this profession.

I entered the Academy very young, at nineteen. At that age, from an artistic point of view—and especially with the background I came from—you are not yet mature enough to make truly relevant decisions about your way of life or the course of your career.

The kind of natural naïveté that was operating in me at the time gave me enormous momentum, but it also delayed a number of things in my career. Overall, though, it meant that I never rushed into anything before I was ready.

Somehow, everything around me has always happened at the right time—according to my own personal rhythm—because the fundamental changes have always come only when I was prepared for them. And that remains true to this day.

Ágnes Képiró: Your painting is what the wider public primarily knows. When did the shift from graphic art to painting take place?

György Verebes: There was no real shift, basically. Partly because of my fellow students, I stayed in graphic art, and partly because I was lazy enough not to want to deal with all the complications of changing specialisation at the Academy.

I had settled into it comfortably, and from then on it never even occurred to me to move towards painting while I was there.

I had to acquire my knowledge of painting after leaving the Academy, on my own, without a master. But I think that did me good, because I had to work extremely hard for it.

Of course, I saw a great deal and moved within a professional artistic environment, but there was no one there to guide me professionally.

Ágnes Képiró: How would you describe the nearly ten years between receiving your art degree and arriving in Szolnok?

György Verebes: I graduated from the Academy in 1992. That was when the Yugoslav wars began. The 1990s were an adventurous period. I have to say, I lived dangerously.

I spent a great deal of time at the artists’ residence in Kecskemét, and I made a living in several different ways. I played music in clubs, worked for a graphic design company, and for many years painted portraits both in Hungary and abroad.

Later I was able to step away from that. It was a very interesting experience.

Playing music also meant being part of nightlife. My arrival in Szolnok brought that period to an end, and that was a very good decision. Before then, I had genuinely been living a nomadic life in almost every sense.

Ágnes Képiró: You have lived and worked at the Szolnok Artists’ Colony since 2002. Under your leadership the Colony has flourished again, while your own art has also become increasingly widely known.

György Verebes: Choosing Szolnok did not require me to cut anything out of my life that had already been part of it. The only things that gradually fell away were those that tend to disappear anyway as a person gets older.

In Szolnok, a fundamental sense of responsibility that had always been present in me was able to come fully into its own.

From that point onwards I began working for the Szolnok Artists’ Colony, not for my own career. I was not building my own career; I was building the Colony’s. And the history of the Colony and the history of my own career began to intertwine like a DNA helix.

There was nothing deliberate about this. I simply wanted to see what I was doing function well, and what I was doing was the Szolnok Artists’ Colony.

There is something elemental here that shapes a person. It calls forth respect and humility in relation to tradition, while at the same time creating an equally elemental need to renew that tradition continually so that it can remain alive.

It is like tending a plant day after day, and then later gathering its fruit and being nourished by it yourself.

In my eyes, the Szolnok Artists’ Colony is a living being. Something alive and open, an organism.

If the occasion arose, I could draw or paint it as a protective being growing out of itself, spreading its wings: a guardian spirit.

I work beneath the wings of this guardian spirit, and I try to support those wings with my shoulders.

Ágnes Képiró: Recently you have been working on a new cycle of paintings, although it is not entirely new, since it is organically connected to your earlier series. You have several exhibitions opening this year in which you are presenting the new work.

György Verebes: I belong among those artists who need to remain true to themselves while continually renewing themselves.

I do not need a revolutionary break with my former self.

It is important to respect the person I was twenty years ago, with all his foolishness and all his mistakes. Because there was someone then who carried this consciousness, and there is someone now who carries a consciousness that will still be active twenty years from now.

The task that comes towards you—the task that you yourself have called forth through your earlier actions—has to be carried out with integrity, and you have to find joy in the way you resolve it.

Painting is like that for me as well.

I waited and waited until I was able to begin working with a form of expression that was the same, yet different.

By now I have entrusted myself to my own paintings: let them paint themselves through me, because they will tell me what they want.

Ágnes Képiró: If it can be put into words, what is the thought or message behind this cycle of paintings?

György Verebes: As time passes over the human body, coordinating that body becomes increasingly difficult. As one approaches the age of sixty, existence within the body begins to reveal its own difficulties and burdens, and with them certain fears and anxieties.This series is also an expression of that experience. That is why it is called Soma Sema, a classical Greek formulation which, very simply put, means the body as a prison.

A person has to recognise that who he is is not identical with the body.

The body functions like a vehicle that has to be oiled from time to time, and one has to prepare oneself for the fact that eventually that vehicle will cease to function.

Until then, however, the body can be used to its fullest; one can draw everything possible from it. And together with the body, the world surrounding the body—which is in fact my own created world—will gradually begin to fade.

One can prepare for this.

And the body should be used in such a way that we draw as much from it as we possibly can.

This series is the lived experience of that state of body and soul.