I was born in Daruvar, ex-Yugoslavia.
I have been living in Italy since 1941 and in Rome since 1946.
I have always been a painter, merely a painter. Besides I should not be able to do other jobs. This one I have chosen in the freedom of my conscience.
Such feelings are at time awfully hard, and sometimes even bitter along a life time.
They say that my artistic personality is not to be compared to anybody else′s. I accept this definition with true modesty, but if somebody were to find colours and styles unlike mine own in my paintings.
I would be glad just the same; as in this world no one is nobody′s child. It is not important to share the work; to believe in it is important.
I have toured the world in difficult dark times, carrying my paintings under my arm in order to show them to whom I meant.
I was comforted and encouraged.
I always come back to Rome, a drugging-city for my art thirst.
During the early years I exhibited along Via Margutta where my friends and colleagues were Mafai and Guttuso, Cagli and Amerigo Tot, Luigi Bartolini and Maccari, and I might go on mentioning Arnoldo Ciarrocchi and Emilio Greco.
I don′t want to forget to say that "Boheme" is well worth when you can narrate it, or when you realize that you have lived through it without knowing it. However it is not necessary for an artist, believe me. Invention is probably less impelling, but it is certainly deeper when you have eaten at least a first course.
My first personal exhibition took place in Rome in 1947 at the Gallery "La Finestra". At that time I lived in Via del Babuino. That is why the Roman street has remained in my heart. A lean, meagre street, yet dreaming, deluded and deceived by the shadows of friends which come all back to me while I put them all in Heaven, even those who would run strait on the motor road to Hell.
Places and times are now different. Nowadays you travel by Jumbo Jet, while in those times you had to go on foot, or at the most you must travel third class if you wanted to talk painting with those who new more than you.
I got a diploma ? I was little more than a child then ? at the Academy of Fine Arts in Lyon.
There are still the same boundary walls there, but Time has lorded them, as it the logical order of its flowing.
