Martina Pilcerova interviewed
01/09/2002 . Source: Paul Barnett 

Talented Slovak science fiction artist Martina Pilcerova on how Star Wars changed her life, plus the fun you can get creating fantasy paintings in the ex-soviet block. Ace interviewer, Paul Barnett, serves up a couple of her stunning images too.

One of the many joys of running the Paper Tiger Online Gallery is that every now and then there comes along stunning work by an artist of whom one has previously heard little.

One such has been the Slovak artist Martina Pilcerova, to whose exhibit at Chicon your editor made a beeline. He was not disappointed; suffice it to say that the Snarl's sole Chicon art purchase, made despite lethally straitened financial circumstances, was one of Martina's prints -- fortunately for late-night agonizing sessions, none of her paintings was for sale.

And one of the treats of the convention was being able to meet Martina herself . . . and to interview her for this e-zine.

PS: What brought you into fantasy/sf art.

MP: It happened through seeing Star Wars as a small child. I really liked it, but I didn't straight away start reading science fiction -- I was really into American Indians and things at the time. However, I wanted to be an astronaut as a very small child, and I was very interested in astronomy.

I started to draw as soon as I could hold a pencil in my hand. I was a bit of a problem child, full of energy, very mobile, very difficult for people to look after. So . . . when someone wanted to get rid of me for a while they could just put a pencil in my hand and that was all right: they were free.

PS: What about formal training?

MP: In Czechoslovakia -- and now in the two separate republics -- they have what are called Primary Art Schools, which take kids aged six to fourteen. Your studies there are in addition to normal school. I started a year early, at the age of five. Between the ages of about six and ten I won many prizes for children's art competitions.

After that I went to Secondary Grammar School (the equivalent of High School in the USA), and there was no art education there. But from the age of about fifteen I started publishing comic strips, first in newspapers, then in a Slovak comics magazine called Bublinky -- which means "bubbles" (i.e., speech bubbles) in English. I also published in a Hungarian comics magazine.

PS: Did you at the time assume you were going to pursue a career in comics?

MP: No -- in fact, I don't even like comics any more. I started applying to the University of Fine Art in Bratislava. But there was a difficulty, in that they didn't like science-fiction art. I had to apply every year for four years, and it was only in the fifth year that they accepted me.

While I was waiting, I started to work for Czech and Slovak magazines, doing illustrations and some covers. These were magazines like Ikarie -- that was the only Czech sf magazine at the time -- and the Czech version of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

Anyway, the University of Fine Art in Bratislava finally accepted me, and I finished a bachelor's degree there; this year I'm going to complete my master's degree, also at the University of Fine Art. I'm also in a studio called Creative Experimental Studio Bratislava -- the acronym for this in Slovak is KR*E*S*BA, which means "drawing". The great thing about the studio is that it allows me to do anything I want to -- movies, bronze sculptures, etchings, you name it.

When I started to study at the University of Fine Art I also took a course for two years at the University of Film at Bratislava specializing in animation, especially camera work and scripting.

PS: What magazines and other venues have you published in since then?

MP: Albedo One, Odyssey, the SWFA Bulletin (their Special Collectors' Issue), a lot of books and magazines in the Czech Republic and Germany . . . I also did work for the RPG Waste World, produced by Bill King's company Manticore.

But this game lasted only about a year, because the distribution wasn't good. I did thirteen illustrations for it, including three cover pieces. Only three of the books were published in the USA, alas. One of the pictures I did for Waste World was later used as the cover for the Italian gaming magazine Kaos.

Including comics magazines, I've done something like thirty-six cover illustrations, all told. I know it's not a lot so far, but I hope there'll be plenty more!

PS: It strikes me as quite a lot for an artist who's still only 27! What about awards?

MP: Just the one, so far -- the Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Awards in Prague gave me their 1998 award for Best Artist in the Czech Republic and Slovak Republic.

PS: There's a lot of talk at the convention about the movie you're working on at the moment. Tell us more about it.

MP: It's called When the Music's Over, and it's written by Myra Cakan and named for the Jim Morrison song. The original novel was also by Myra, and was published first in Germany. It's a live-action movie, not animated, and it's going to be one of the biggest sf productions ever made in Germany.

Myra's working with John Shirley on the script, which will be in English. Preproduction will start in 2002 . . . but I can't tell you much more than that at the moment, for obvious reasons of confidentiality. I've so far done various script illustrations (conceptuals) for the movie, and you can see three of these, plus a bit more about the movie, on Myra's website: www.dardariee.de.

PS: Living and working in Slovakia, as you do, how do you find it getting commissions from the UK and the USA?

MP: Very hard! Publishers always think I'm living at the end of the world, but in reality where I live doesn't make any difference. There have been no problems at all, for example, about my working with Dreamstone, who're doing prints of two of my paintings, despite the fact that they're in Australia and I'm in Slovakia. The internet and courier services like DHL mean I might as well be living just down the road.

PS: Are you thinking of moving to the States?

MP: I would move here if it were possible and if I could get work here, but there are all sorts of difficulties -- like getting a green card. Anyway, if the German movie project comes to fruition the way it looks as if it will, I'll have to go and live in Berlin for some time.

PS: What are your plans for the future? Are you planning to use your animation training?

MP: My animation training is useful for knowing how the special effects of films work -- I wanted to know about the whole moviemaking process, and of course animation is very close to special effects. It's also useful for doing the script illustrations to know how a film works -- I'm calling them "script illustrations" rather than "pre-production illustrations" because at the moment they're all still in my copyright.

PS: Other future plans?

MP: In 1989 I started to work on a story, and it's taken me a long time to develop it! I'm still working on it in my spare time to produce a script. My dream, of course, is that one day it will become my own movie project. The story is called Niki -- The Wanderer of the Sun -- and it's science fiction, set in what's entirely my own universe, created from scratch. I have a lot of sketches for it, because I think visually about these things and can already see it as a movie. I don't want to talk too much more about it at the moment, though, because it's all still very close to me.

I've done some writing other than this -- in fact, I've twice been nominated for the Best Fantasy Story originally published in the Czech Republic, in 1991 and 2000. It's funny, because they're the only two stories I've written that I've ever sent anywhere. Funny, too, because I dislike fantasy -- I like to read science fiction. A lot of the "proper" writers were very annoyed that I was nominated -- because I'm an artist, after all, not a writer!

A version of this article originally appeared in The Snarl, Paper Tiger’s reader zine. Many thanks to the Snarl’s Editor extraordinaire, Paul Barnett (www.papertiger.co.uk), for letting us recycle their prose.