dasa bausova

Glenwood Springs Post Independent, Glenwood Springs, CO

A&E Options, Art, -feature story - p. B6
August 6-7, 2004

All About Dasa
by Ryan Graff
Post Independent Staff

Dasa Bausova’s current art exhibit, “All About Eve,” is an unlikely show. In her paintings, Bausova positions the biblical Eve against trees, serpents, and apples - obviously referencing original sin.

But it isn't the content of the paintings that make the show unlikely; it is Bausova’s history.

As a kid, she didn’t even want to be a painter. She preferred theater and performing.

“It seemed like such a solitary thing to do,” she said of painting. But, “When I became a teenager, the solitary thing became really appealing.”

Beyond not wanting to be a painter, Bausova was also born in communist Czechoslovakia, where the government, she says, would have people “believe that religion was for the feeble-minded, that it was the opiate of the masses.” But where religion did exist “under the rug.”

Bausova’s family was “politically on the wrong side of the tracks.” So in the early 1980s she stole her and her family’s passports from a tour guide and escaped to Austria, and eventually immigrated to America.

Though Bausova hadn't had much exposure to religion in Czechoslovakia, she had been fascinated by it.

“The decision (Eve) made to bite the apple was the most important decision made in Judeo-Christian history,” she said. “She shaped the fate of humanity, in symbolic terms.”

When Bausova got the United States she found that her American friends had very strong concepts of religion.

“I don’t have that concept ingrained in me, like someone would of my generation in this country, so I've had to make my own,” she said.

Bausova began to read the Bible and study the origins of sin, which she said lie in ancient Hebrew and Hindu texts.

In those texts, the concept of sin emerged from archery, and simply meant to be off target she said.

“I think we experience the same thing daily with decisions that take us off the path of where we need to go,” she said. “We all struggle daily, directly or indirectly, with sin. We all struggle daily with all the seemingly insignificant decisions.”

“That is what this show is really about, that internal struggle, internal process.”

Beyond the religious implications of Bausova’s exhibition at the Carbondale Council on Arts and Humanities, the process and materials she used to create her paintings are intriguing.

She painted on glass, using oil paints on the front to create the images, then painted abstract figures on the back in water color. She used aluminum foil and bubble wrap to create reflections and the scales of serpents.

As for “All About Eve”" answering questions about sin, or taking a stance on morality, or history, it’s not supposed to.

“Ultimately art is about asking questions, not about getting answers,“ she said.

Bausova’s work will be on display at the Carbondale Council on Arts and Humanities office, 645 Main St., until Aug. 22.

Gazette, Cedar Rapids, IA

Arts, Books, Events, Reviews - feature story
September 21, 2003

On the Contrary: Exiled Czech Artist Draws on Contradiction
by Judith Winter ©2003 Free-lance writer

Reprinted with permission:

In 1980, the night before fleeing communist Czechoslovakia with her mother, 15-year-old Dasa Bausova (pronounced Dásha Baoshová) lay awake thinking about all she would be leaving.

“I'd be leaving for what? It was solely based on, if I didn’t take this opportunity, I have regret to live with my entire life,” reminisced Bausova, surrounded by her paintings at the National Czech and Slovak Museum and Library.

With the help of strangers, the clothes on their backs and the equivalent of $20, she and her mother eventually made it to an Austrian refugee camp where they spent a year. During this time other refugees saw Bausova artwork and paid her to draw portraits.

By the time she was 16, Bausova lived in Ohio where the big blue endless sky seemed so low she feared it would fall. In Czechoslovakia the sky had seemed misty, esoteric and out of reach. It was transition time.

No more living under close governmental scrutiny because of an uncles anti-communist writing, resulting in jail for all family males. No more living in a small country existing at the whim of larger, more powerful neighbors. No free college education and national health care. And no more having only one laundry detergent available. On the other hand, Bausova found that the freedom of having more (detergent) choices cut into time and energy once used for imagination and introspection.

Oh, yes, and no more daily, “Welcome to school. There is no God.” Bausova had found it difficult to separate what was unacceptable at school and work from what was acceptable at home - for example, faith. She simultaneously lived in two worlds, not an easy thing for a child to understand.

This duality may be at the heart of her what-wrong-with-this-picture art, paintings filled with easily recognizable objects, but seemingly out of context, much as in a dream or fantasy. Welcome to Bausova Magic Realism.

Her work is very colorful. The twelve 22 inch by 29 inch mixed-media paintings made specifically for this exhibit have titles and borders embedded into the art, creating a burlesque-theater-circus-like atmosphere which isn’t surprising considering all the childhood hours spent backstage where her mother was a dancer - on television and in variety theater that included trapeze artists, singers, sword fighters, talking parrots and trained bears.

Her inspirations come from advertising, literature, lyrics, film, Czech folk art, old Slavic icon paintings, African and Islamic design, history, and communist and democratic incongruities, to name a few.

About her exhibit titled “Improbable Narratives,” displayed in Laska Gallery, Bausova states, “We can never get rid of contradictory ideas and factors in a free society and our success appears to depend on our ability to balance these opposites.”

She exudes enthusiasm for life, life ironies, and for the opportunity to exhibit here, her first show with a direct connection to her Czech heritage.

Anyone who stereotypes exiles as being older people might be startled with her youth and knowledge. She is short, slight in stature but solid in spirit, a well-grounded pixie-like female with large round eyes and naturally spiking to-die-for bed-head hair.

Bausova pointed out something in a painting that seemed nonsensical. She giggled and said, “I don know why I had to put that there. It was just intuitive.”

One cultural difference to be aware of when viewing her work is the Czech concept of the devil “who is more of a playful trickster whose function is to teach people lessons.”

Some of her paintings are surprisingly simple and straightforward such as “Jumping Jesus, Holy Cow,” from lyrics she once heard on the radio. She added subtle humor by imitating Marcel Duchamp “Nude Descending a Staircase”- type movement with Jesus' legs.

One of her more complex paintings, exploring the Czech psyche, is “The Hypnotist,” based on a movie, a novel, and the Velvet Revolution, which refers to a pink tank still standing in Prague. When the communists left Czechoslovakia, instead of destroying the memorialized Russian tank, the Czechs painted it pink.

Bausova work is full of wit and humor, ranging from dark to ah-ha, ha-ha, to hmmmmm. And just as our lives are built upon layers of experience, she layers ideas and paint, sometimes as many as 30 coats.

Some of her work may seem irreverent, but it comes from curiosity, not malice. On the other hand, nothing is sacred in her search to make sense of that which may not make sense.

Bausova completed two U.S. college degrees, lives near Aspen, Colorado, and regularly visits friends and relatives in her homeland.

Her work gives us much to think about, much as she had things to consider that night before fleeing Czechoslovakia.

Snowmass Village Sun, Snowmass Village, CO

Snowmass Scene, p. 1
May 28-June 3, 2003

Dasa Bausova: From Flight to Freedom to Flights of Fantasy
By Ann Larson Sun Special Correspondent

In 1980, when she was 15 years old and living in a refugee camp with her mother in Arbing, Austria, Dasa (pronounced Dasha) Bausova committed to be an artist. From her flight away from the communist regime in Czechoslovakia to the flights of fancy in her paintings, Bausova has developed a rich and vibrant style as an artist and a person over the years.

For a child growing up in a Cold War communist country in a family that was under suspicion for being anti-government, developing an “absurdist humor was a matter of survival,” she said. This humor has been honed and refined over the years and is expressed in her art and her personality.

Bausova will be displaying her paintings at a two-woman show along with Wewer Keohane at Metaphor Gallery at Aspen Highlands, which opens Friday, June 13, from 6-9 p.m. Her work will also be on display at Cafe Bernard in Basalt for the month of June. Connecting with her roots again, Bausova will have a solo show at the National Czech and Slovak Museum in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, this fall.

Although her youth was filled with art classes and she always drew and painted, Bausova had no intention of being an artist. She was much more drawn to the theater, which had been her second home. Her mother was a dancer and she spent much of her childhood backstage during rehearsals. She does admit that “without art, I would have been a completely different person.”

When she was young, her mother traveled to the U.S. to visit her two brothers, who escaped earlier. She had to leave Dasa behind due to the policies of the communist regime. But after the trip, Dasa mother was resolved to escape from behind the Iron Curtain and to move to the U.S.

Czechs were allowed to travel to Yugoslavia to an enclosed vacation complex, but had to give up their passports when they arrived, so that they would not try to flee to the West. Mother and daughter took such a trip with the intention of making a run for the border when they got their passports back.

Fate intervened when they were departing and had arrived at the bus early. That when one of the guards allowed Dasa to distribute a stack of passports to the returning travelers. Luckily, their papers were in the stack, and after passing the rest on, she and her mother were able to sneak away and hide out in a hotel for Germans.

With only $20 in hand and the kindness of strangers, they made their way to Austria, where they were put in “an armored car, fingerprinted and carted off to a refugee camp in the Austrian Alps.”

The refugee camp was the birthplace for Bausova’s realization that she could live life as an artist. She earned money by drawing portraits of the other refugees. “That’s when I realized that art was the primary force in my life. I could always pick up a piece of paper and pencil. No one could make me do it and no one could stop me from doing it.”

After seven months in the camp, the Bausovas were able to emigrate to Cleveland where Dasa’s uncle lived. Although she spoke no English, she entered high school as a sophomore and continued her education in the commercial art program. It was a very different life than the eight years she spent at the People Schools of Arts in her hometown of Carlsbad, “where folklore was prevalent and glorified by the cultural leadership.”

Despite the language limitations, she was able to earn good grades. When she graduated at age 18, she was accepted to Parsons School of Design, but was surprised to discover that in the U.S. one was expected to pay for a higher schooling. She could not afford to pay the tuition. Instead, she attended Cuyahoga Community College in Cleveland, where she studied with a variety of retired teachers from Cleveland Institute of Art and felt lucky to get such a good education.

Bausova spent five years at the college, dabbling in every discipline from painting, ceramics, printmaking, theater and dance to philosophy and computers. “I was like a kid in a candy store.” she remembers. “For me, it wasn’t about getting a degree, it was just about art and learning.”

With an associates degree from Cuyahoga, she went to Ohio University and earned a B.F.A. and followed that up with an M.A. in Arts Administration from Indiana University, where she studied side-by-side with M.B.A.s.

It was at Ohio University where she underwent a personal evolution. “That is where I discovered the aesthetic that I into now,” she said. She followed this pursuit for 10 years. Recently, she was introduced to “magic realism,” which is how she now describes her art. “In my work I describe phantasmagoric narratives using colorful representations.”

Phantasmagoria is a fantastic sequence of haphazard images that are associated with each other, as in dreams. Flying cats and evolved monkeys are images that Bausova uses to show “the paradox of human existence,” which is the “constant and ongoing negotiation of polarities.”

Influenced by music, she can be captured by a phrase or line in a song and transform it into a whole series of paintings, as it did with Elvis Costello words, “maybe I should have left the world to the monkeys.” Literature, philosophy and mythology add historic depth into her work. From Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell’s work, she uses the symbol of the monkey to describe the hero journey.

In addition to her educational influences, Bausova life and Slavic heritage cannot be denied in her work. Her wit and humor cannot be suppressed. If we are created out of our history, and our creations reveal our past, then she reveals herself with each painting she creates.

Aspen Times Weekly, Aspen, CO

Arts & Entertainment, p. 1
January 9-11, 2003

Artist Dasa Bausova Creates Layers Tinged with Laughter
By Stewart Oksenhorn
Aspen Times Staff Writer

Dasa Bausova knows that life can be hard. A native of the Czech Republic, Bausova escaped from the closed, Communist society by snatching her and her mother’s passports from authorities while the two were vacationing in Yugoslavia. Bausova, then 16, eventually made it to Austria, where she spent seven months in a refugee camp before settling in the U.S.

So she makes sure that her art conveys a sense of fun and humor. Bausova’s paintings are, almost without exception, powerfully colorful. Her imagery includes animals mainly monkeys and cats angels, anthropomorphic suns, and, most recently, flowers. Even the titles of her work can cause a chuckle: a painting of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, at that most crucial of moments in human history, is titled “Eve’s Well Publicized Apple Decision,” and her monkey-centric series, Memoirs of a Primate, features titles like “Monkey Wish,” “Monkey Think” and “Monkey Do.”

“I think that life is serious enough,” said the 37-year-old Bausova, who moved to the Roaring Fork Valley in 1997, after spending most of her American years in the Midwest. “And it’s also very ridiculous and absurd. If we can’t laugh about it, what’s the point? It would be too depressing without that.”

But there is more to Bausova’s art than the surface color and apparent lightness. Speaking of her work, Bausova rarely goes more than a few minutes without referring to the idea of layers. There are physical layers to her paintings; Bausova is an incurable tinkerer, and when a piece is finally finished, it might have 30 separate layers of paint. And beyond the physical, there are layers of meaning to her art.

Her most recent series of flower pieces oils on glass, handcolored monotypes, and wax oil pastels on paper, all of which come under the collective rubric of "Botanical Instances"would seem simple enough. But Bausova sees more than just flowers.

“What they have to do with,” she says, “is identity. It’s a very simple idea we're all the same, but we're all different. We all have arms, heads, brains. But no two brains work alike.” Moreover, the flowers have stretched Bausova’s technical skills. “It’s been a technical exercise for me, going from glass to paper to panel.”

In all her work, there are references to Bausova’s life, her interests and motivations, and the stray thoughts that enter her mind. The Memoirs of a Primate series, for instance, stemmed from her discovery that the monkey has been a frequent subject in both Indian art, an early passion of hers, and medieval art.

The monkey fascination was furthered by a lyric from the Elvis Costello song, “God’s Comic”: “I've been wading through all this unbelievable junk/And wondering if I should have given the world back to the monkeys.” “I loved the idea of, what if the monkeys did have the world, and not us? That whole ‘Planet of the Apes’ thing,” said Bausova.

Finally, there was a story Bausova had read, which inspired her 1999 painting “Anonymous Saint,” the piece that began the monkey series. The story was about a saint who had no faith. The writer observed that the saint’s awareness of his lack of faith was like a gorilla eating at his heart.

Bausova took those influences her art studies, her fondness for music, and a story she read and added her own take on the world to give the Memoirs of a Primate series a sense of humor and a wealth of meaning. “What I've used the monkeys for is to describe a personal journey. Things we all go through,” she said. “So again, there’s commonality wish, love, fear, think. I describe what we all go through but using a monkey, it’s easier to laugh at.”

One of the weightier of the monkey pieces is “Monkey Do” an image of a muscular, heroic monkey, holding a sickle, the Soviet symbol of the working class.

A twist on the traditional Bausova has also dealt with religion in her art. Angels, serpents, and heavenly lights all come into play in what she calls her “Ideological Instances.” But hers is not the typical take, with art as religious object.

“Having grown up in a Communist country I had no religious upbringing,” said Bausova, who was trained in painting, music and theater at the People’s School of the Arts in the Czech Republic. “But I was aware of religion. I always had a curiosity about faith and ritual. It was all very mystical and foreign to me. So I've been exploring it, and these paintings are a part of that exploration.”

“They're not straight worship objects. There’s always a twist to them, an almost existential take.”

In “Eve’s Well Publicized Apple Decision,” the twist is in the title, which refers to just how momentous a choice Eve made, lo those many years ago. “In all of Western Judeo-Christian tradition, the biggest decision was made by a woman. If Eve hadn’t eaten the apple, we'd be in paradise!” said Bausova.

In “Mary and Her Children,” Bausova examines the biblical references to Jesus' brothers and sisters, and the fact that little is made of how those siblings were conceived. And in “Mamincin andlek” Czech for “Mommy’s angel” a woman holds a bottle to her breast, as a winged cherub looks on. To Bausova, it is always a little startling, and a little funny, when people notice the bright colors and the overall cheerfulness of such a painting, without realizing a detail like a mother cradling a bottle instead of a baby.

“It’s always amazing when people look at my work and say, ‘Oh, it’s so sweet, it’s so warm,’” she said. “And they don’t notice the gorilla eating the human heart for some reason.”

Which is okay with Bausova. The narrative and multiple layers are as much for herself as for the viewer. Alexis Smith, an artist who shows her work in Aspen, said something that stuck with Bausova: “She said, by painting, that’s how she works through life. And I really related to that. I guess, in painting, art, that’s where I make sense out of the world.”

“I always have an outside influence and a personal experience too. There are all these layers of stories you can find in them, if you want to. Or if people just want to look at the work and leave it there and enjoy it, that’s fine too. But it’s really important for me to have that content there, if people want to dig for it. Because that’s what I enjoy about it — finding layers of ideas, as well as the actual, physical expression.”

After a recent rollerblading accident left her unable to do most anything but paint, Bausova gave up all steady day jobs to focus on her art. She is satisfied it was the right move, as exhibitors are increasingly showing her work. Her art can currently be seen in several places: the Metaphor Gallery at Aspen Highlands Village, the Basalt branch of Vectra Bank, and in the Rich Wagar real estate office in Aspen. In March, she will be part of a group exhibit at the Aspen Chapel Gallery, and she plans to show her work this spring at Cafe Bernard in Basalt and at the Aspen Club. Beyond that are two significant, one-person exhibits: this summer at the Woody Creek Store & Gallery, and next year at the National Czech & Slovak Museum, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. She also continues to teach art classes at the Red Brick Center for the Arts.

“I feel as though the universe took me by the collar and said, ‘This is what you are doing right now, period,’” said Bausova of her accident. “The universe is too big to fight, so I'm just going with it.”