2024-02-13 21:56:44
He first picked up a paintbrush in his twenties during one sleepless night. Since then, he has been painting every day, gradually “hewing” his profession as an electrician, and under the nickname Filart he has become one of the most followed accounts about fine art on social networks in the Czech Republic. Now the twenty-five-year-old self-taught painter Filip Šícha has worked it all the way to the painting studio at the Ladislav Sutnar Faculty of Art and Design in Pilsen.
Šícha is sitting in a cafe in one of the outskirts of Prague over a cup of espresso. He is wearing a black sweatshirt with striking splashes of red and white. Does he want to let everyone know that he is a painter in body and soul, or does he really not have a single undamaged piece of clothing? “This is my most decent sweatshirt. I have everything, absolutely everything from colors. I always think that I will put some piece of clothing aside and not get it dirty, but there is no chance,” he answers the question.
No wonder. Ever since he was troubled by insomnia, and because of that he tried to paint at night, he says that he has a brush in his hand almost every day. “About eight to nine days out of ten,” he elaborates. He found himself in painting and gradually exchanged it for his original profession of electrician. At first, he tried to work four days a week at his former job and devote the rest to painting, but it wasn’t the same. He felt under pressure and often only had time and space left for small formats.
So he became a full-time painter. Although originally from Prague, he found a background in a house in the south of Bohemia. It may sound romantic, but the work of an artist also presents pitfalls. “About two weeks ago, I didn’t even have white paint. If I sell a painting, I have some money. It’s a question of unstable income, the life of an artist is also about modesty,” he says. “Now I’m having coffee here, so it’s good,” he adds.
Even occasional financial troubles do not deter him. “It’s mainly about finding the courage to start and deciding whether you really want to do it or not. I had a hundred thousand kroner saved at the start. But that was gone within six months,” he says, adding that he worked for a while due to a lack of money on the construction site, but then he fully returned to creation.
Just a few seconds to capture it
His grandmother bought the first painting from Filip Šícha, which gave him courage. He then tried to break through using various methods, which today he considers naive. “I made flyers with some crazy design. They had photos of the paintings, the price and the address. I distributed around ten thousand of them in Prague and southern Bohemia with my dad. About one painting was sold, so it was a very profitable event,” he laughs. with.
He soon understood that the way to success was through social networks. Today, he has almost 60 thousand followers on Instagram, almost ten thousand more on TikTok. He thus became one of the largest Czech accounts focused on visual arts and probably found fans outside the narrow group of people enthusiastic about painting.
He himself is not sure how he did it. You cannot succeed on the Internet today by simply sharing photos of paintings. So he films his day as an artist, the creative process or various funny videos that respond to current trends.
“Maybe he was also interested in my awkward humor,” thinks Šícha. He’s not sure how many people watch it more for the pictures and how many for the jokes. “It’s bound to be some sad affair,” he guesses. “But it seems to me that people also enjoy the art itself, as it is a marginal interest. Looking intently at a painting is difficult, especially nowadays, when you only have a few seconds to interest someone. Still, my followers give my paintings space , he tries to connect with them and understand them,” appreciates the painter.
They owe their livelihood to social networks. Still, he has an ambivalent relationship with them and would like to spend less time staring mindlessly at his phone. “It doesn’t seem healthy to me. And I don’t like the thought of 60,000 of my followers doing the same thing. I see a moral problem in the fact that I’m co-creating a platform that I myself have some reservations about,” he reflects.
Ších’s latest paintings are mostly triptychs. | Photo: Aktuálně.cz/Filip Šícha Archive
Z TikToku and “Sutnarku”
Now the self-made Šícha is about to embark on the path of formal education, from September he will study painting at the Ladislav Sutnar Faculty of Art and Design in Pilsen. According to him, it does not matter much whether the artist has the name of a well-known institution behind him or not. In the end, however, he decided that he would benefit from working on technique, especially figurative work, and he himself did not have enough discipline to devote himself to it systematically. He is looking forward to the new studio in Pilsen and to becoming part of the artistic community there.
Quite possibly, he will be the only one in the class who painted his first strokes on canvas as an adult. Although he is self-taught, he does not consider himself a natural talent. “I remember classmates from elementary school or high school who drew or painted really well. That’s not my case,” he insists. “But maybe I have the advantage of being able to put my soul into it,” he admits. However, he is convinced that if a thousand people painted every day for five years straight, there would be bigger artists among them.
Ších’s style is still taking shape. Today, he recalls with a smile his first works, which he retroactively assesses as naive. However, he leaves even the oldest works hanging on Instagram, knowing full well that this is part of the artistic process.
In recent months, he has been moving towards an increasingly expressive treatise. “It’s spilled strokes, swings and gestures. Now I use the brush less often and apply the paint directly from the tube,” he describes his technique. He is aware that compared to earlier paintings, the current ones seem less pleasing. “Almost unpleasant. But they come more from me. They are exactly as they should be,” he believes.