His birth in the Prlekija region and a modest childhood in Split, Maribor and Ljubljana could not quench the force that brought my father to the Academy of Fine Arts after the war. That is when his prolific creative journey began. He filled canvases with countless images. At heart he remained a curious child, drawn by the inexhaustible power of life and haunted by its transience. He believed in the raw beauty around him. Yet he rarely spoke of himself or of painting: his pictures told their own stories. He stubbornly repeated that artistic trends did not interest him.
He lived to create images, and they in turn created him... Day after day, over years and decades, in his studio on Ljubljana’s Breg embankment and later in the village of Krka in Dolenjska. From his studio he brought the smell of turpentine and paint, soaking
his brushes and scrubbing the dried paint from his hands in the bathroom at home. Walks over Rožnik and through Tivoli cleared his head and he liked going to the Narodni Dom for gymnastics. He surrounded himself with all kinds of people, with the sounds of jazz and a glass of wine, or often merely with the solitude of painting. He quietly drew our lives, made paintings of us growing up, of family holidays, of our expressions of happiness and sorrow. When his hand grew tired, he liked to read. He might forget to take his razor with him on a journey but he never forgot his leather-bound sketchbook. To his last creative days, he remained faithful to paints, brush and canvas... and himself.
Ana Slana, daughter of France Slana
