ON THE SPOT
Pavol Roskovensky
BY CARL-JOHN X _VERAJA Florida Weekly Correspondent

Roskovensky

Born in Slovakia in 1986 and currently enrolled at Florida Gulf Coast University, Pavol Roskovensky is a precocious student who continues to explore the medium of painting. His work is currently on display at the Arts for Act gallery in downtown Fort Myers. Earlier this year, his work was shown at Space 39 during their "The Unconscious Mind: Surrealism and its Legacy" exhibition. On Saturday, Oct. 20, his art will be hung at Space 39 again as part of their Dark Arts exhibition.

Roskovensky's family moved to New York in 1995 where he was further motivated to explore his talent as an artist. He started an art club, took 3-D and animation classes and painted a mural for his high school's cafeteria.

Pavol explained his background and his creative process with FW.

FW: Tell me about yourself as a young student of art?

PV: Well, I believe that you're always a student of art. No matter how old you get. I'm just learning as I go. What I do is I see how other artists from the past and artists today do and market their work and I try to learn from their mistakes and their successes.

COURTESY PHOTO A sampling of Pavol Roskovensky's art

FW: Do you believe in letting yourself make your own mistakes as well?

PV: I make those as I go regardless but if you can avoid a mistake someone else did- or maybe not avoid but you can see what they did and what their result was and see what you're going to do yourself.

FW: Can you talk about some of the people who have influenced or inspired you as a painter?

PV: There are a lot of actual artists from the past that influenced my work. The list goes on for quite a while. Anything from Picasso to Rauschenberg. Even Leonardo da Vinci is a big influence of mine and as for people that I know personally, that I live with, my family is obviously supportive of what I do. I can't even thank them enough. My brother, I live with him, and he's constantly supporting of me. My brother and my sister basically give me personal art critique, what I'm doing in the drawing, they spend a lot of time talking to me about it - telling me their thoughts on it as non-artists. Their thoughts of what they think of me. How it makes them feel. It helps me grow by having input from people who don't know a lot about art. And my girlfriend, Jessica, she's a big influence on me because she just pushes me whenever I'm feeling depressed - she pushes me to just go out there and do it. Not to think about what I'm doing or why just to do it.

FW: What are your memories of Slovakia? How is it different from the United States?

PV: Well, there's been a massive change. I was 9 years old when we moved. I lived in a town called Bardejov - I guess it was a town but the population of it was 25- or 30-thousand people and we moved to New York City which is like twenty times or even more than that full of people. The shock was just massive to go from Slovakia to New York. In Slovakia it was a small town feel. There was a lot of Gothic art and pre-Renaissance art all over Slovakia. All the churches. There's a castle maybe a 25 minute bike ride away from where I used to live. And all of that influenced me a lot. And the idea of religion, Catholic religion, and then segregating the Jewish religion. I'm not really religious but the idea of what religion stands for is pretty obvious in my mind. And part of Slovakia still is immersed in that. The only Jewish synagogue for hundreds of years was built outside of the town on top of a hill where it was very hard to get to. I guess the height influenced me a lot because, I don't know, how do you push people away like that?

FW: The corruption of the church maybe is what fascinated you? Or the prejudice religion can engender in people?

PV: Yes, you said it right. The corruption of the church that kind of led me to explore how actually people react among themselves and how they treat each other outside of the church as well.

FW: In Slovakia this was very pronounced, this anti-Semitic sentiment at one time? Or is it still there?

PV: Well, I guess it's still there as much as it is anywhere in the world. Kind of swept under the rug. But I wasn't alive and during WWII and even before WWII anti-Semitism was massive in Europe. I would guess it was massive in Slovakia, too.

FW: What about structure in your art?

PV: I'm not sure what that question means but I can talk to you about how I create my compositions.

FW: Ok.

PV: I start without having any premeditated idea of what I want to create. Maybe a feeling is ok. I'm trying to convey a feeling or something. But I kind of, the initial act of creating or starting a piece is completely and absolutely spontaneous. You know, a stain or a shadow I see or the canvas or something. Something that feels or seems like it's completely out of my control. I just, in a way, meditate on what I see in the canvas. A stain of paint or a stain of anything. A shadow or the way the wrinkles in the canvas might create a shadow. I focus on what I see in there and I feel that in a way the painting that is not created yet is already there I just can't see it. But it's really there. The abstract nonsense, basically what's on the canvas there that I did or didn't put on there. I just focus on that and really listen to the painting and what it's trying tell me. What it truly is. And I want to get an idea of what I see. I try to create that on the canvas as I create I might see other things and bring some things out in attention and put some things back. Basically, that's the way the canvas tells me what it wants, really.