Czech illustrator showcases U.S. travels through pen-and-ink drawings
Vojta Berka, a Czech artist and illustrator, recently took a trip to the United States and saw it all — from the skyscrapers of New York City, to the vast countryside of Utah. Along the way, he filled his notebook with sketches of American cities, landscapes, and animals, capturing the North American continent from a European perspective.
Now, Vojta’s drawings are on display in the Ink Trail exhibition at the American Center in Prague, from Wednesday until January 23. I spoke with Vojta at our Prague studio about his artistic inspirations and experience traveling across the United States.
To start off, I wanted to ask you just to tell me more about the exhibition. Where did the inspiration come from, and how did you decide to document your travels across the U.S. with notebook pen-and-ink drawings?
“I started creating the drawings just traveling around the U.S. It's always been a dream of mine that I wanted to do with a friend. But then COVID hit and he had a little kid, so I made the journey by myself, traveling around the country in a car for a long road trip.”
“And I've always been drawing, so that was something I didn't really think about, to be honest. I just had my notebook with me and started drawing. The only new thing for me was I've never really done a lot of landscapes. It's a weird thing to do with a ballpoint pen or a pen or, like a thin line. So that was fun, finding a way how to express a landscape in a line, because I feel like painting, to be honest, fits the landscape much better — the masses — but the lines are fun. And once I started with it, I just kept going, finished the whole notebook, and then started coloring them as well, digitally.”
What about the North American continent did you think would make for a good project to turn into an exhibition?
I didn't think about an exhibition from the get-go. I was just interested in the countryside, to be honest. For me — for a European — the American countryside has a lot of draw. It’s so big and unsettled still. Like here, you climb a hill and you can see two villages and a city over there. In the Adirondacks, you climb a hill and there’s nothing around, and you can see for miles and miles. So that’s a sensation of the countryside that you cannot have in Europe anymore. It's too populated here. So that always drew me, as well as the national parks. It feels so new and fresh around the Utah area or the Four Corners. It's so dramatic with these breaks in the countryside and different levels and cliffs. It's something you don't get here that much.”
“So, there's a lot of different things that really interest me in the American countryside, and that's why I started. It wasn’t a goal from the start to make an exhibition out of it. But once I was at it, I had enough. So I turned it into an exhibition.”
Where in the U.S. did you go and how long was your trip?
“The trip was about two months long. But I managed to see quite a bit, I would say. I traveled a little bit around the Northeast. I went to Maine. I visited my friends in Saratoga Springs in upstate New York. And then I went to New York, flew to New Orleans, and then, I flew to San Francisco, and that is where the trip started — where I rented a car and then did a big circle road trip around the Southeast, as far as Colorado and New Mexico, and visited the national parks around the area.”
As I understand, you decided you wanted to embrace the two dimensionality of the places that you saw through your artwork and use a reduced color palette. I was wondering if you could talk more about that and what inspired that decision.
“I've always been into abstract art a lot, and I love American painters as well, like Jackson Pollock or Mark Rothko or Franz Kline. And they've always stressed this, and that was always something that I admire about abstract painting — the way it kind of throws away that illusion of depth that you have in a lot of fine art and a lot of painting. It’s like a flat surface, and you're trying to make something look real and deep, as in spatially, I mean. I've always admired the way where you do the opposite and just admit that it is a flat surface and you're playing tricks, and kind of highlighting that it's a visual trick.”
“Taking a line and drawing the countryside is already kind of abstract in itself. It doesn't feel very real as you do it, even the normal way, because it's something so different from the masses of the real countryside. So it felt like something that was fun to me and interests me visually.”
And as you went on your trip, was there any way that your style of drawing changed throughout the process, like as you drew more and more places and animals?
“Yeah, for sure. The drawing style changed a little bit, but not much. The painting changed a lot — the coloring part. I was just trying to use the iPad and see what I can do. So naturally, as I went on, I learned more and more and found color combinations or just ways how to take these drawings and make them into semi-painting depth. I did find a little groove towards the end of the process, mainly in the coloring part, I would say.”
What are some of your favorite pieces that you drew on your trip?
“There's these lighthouses in Maine, near Portland, and they were a lot of fun to visit. Nice memory. But also I have the different versions of them, and there's two of them. One is super simple, and that was one of the first drawings where I just did a really simple sketch, and then coloring it was really nice because you have more freedom with the coloring then. I also have a very realistic drawing of the lighthouse. So it's a nice combination of a realistic drawing — and also another version, which is super simple, but then with the coloring process, you can do more and enjoy painting that one a little more.”
