The Poor Country

Growing up poor in the Czech Republic, painter and graphic artist Max Švabinský developed a passionate love for the city’s botanicals. Flowers were his first muse, and arguably what continued to inspire his career in the arts. 

Inspiration from his hometown, Kroměříž, and its surrounding pastures are everywhere in his work. It seems like an odd anecdote to give you for, what can seem like, a fairly pedestrian painting. But Max Švabinský’s fervent love for the verdant stokes my obscure rage about American public spaces. 

Shared natural land that is maintained and cultivated for the sake of the public is – quite literally – the foundation of civilization. In many ways, this blog will advocate for a return to the cultural sensibilities of indigenous peoples as a means of rehabilitating a planet ravaged by industrialism. 

We’re told this woman is poor, but with a first full of flowers, is she? What is wealth and why is living with the land seen as lacking it? In nature, we should theoretically have all we need. 

All the benefits of integrating ourselves back into the ecosystem aside, we should value nature and integrate it into urban public spaces. 

And I understand this is a very weird tangent to take for a whatever painting of some forlorn woman, but it’s none the less where this painting takes me.