My Story

What is fate? Something predetermined for us? Are we just pieces in the hands of some entity that decides about our existence? And if not, who or what leads us to the steps that ultimately decide our lives? Do we even have the freedom to choose?

Advertising

At the time when I began to wonder where to take my life next, I was going through both a personal and a professional decline. I had worked in advertising for almost twenty years. I started in the nineties as a graphic designer with a computer. I loved computers and graphics, and the demand of the emerging capitalist market far exceeded the supply. There were so many commissions that I soon founded my own company. Employees came, and the company grew into a medium-sized advertising agency. It seemed to run by itself. I surrounded myself with capable people and we created a great team that could creatively solve any brief. Gradually I shed my duties, delegated responsibility to my subordinates and went to meetings with clients myself – coffees, lunches, meetings.

It was a successful period in every respect and I was convinced it would never end. I lived through the golden era of advertising, a time when a computer was still a real rarity. I was in demand, I was friends with well-known media personalities and enjoyed all the benefits of life and the times. Later came a family, children… Like a fairy tale.

Over the years, however, the seeming idyll changed. Work became more and more stressful. New technologies arrived, social networks, research, measurement and tablets entered advertising – and we could not keep up the pace. It required constant learning, for which there was neither time nor space. After the 2008 crisis a new generation of talented people arrived. Pressure on the agency grew and prices fell. Problems piled up and I gradually slid into complete burnout. Critical situations, endless conflicts and unsolvable problems were the order of the day. Hell. I lived in permanent stress. Apathy towards work set in, and finally the agency collapsed. I sensed it coming, but I couldn’t do anything to save it. It was only a matter of time.

I was used to a very high standard of living, so I took it hard. The money stopped flowing. Depression, mood swings and changes in behaviour followed, and soon after a break-up with my family. I lost everything I had lived in until then.

I blamed the whole world for my failure. It was the failure that tormented me most. And through my behaviour I also lost the friends I still had. That finished me off.

For two years I did nothing. I didn’t know what to do next. From time to time I tried to come up with something that would get me back on my feet. I spent all the money I had earned and drowned in memories, depression and fear, without any vision for the future. I realised that I was unemployable on the job market. For twenty years I had been a boss; the company had built systems and structures, in its last years it ran only on inertia, until it finally went bankrupt. By then I actually didn’t know how to do anything. I wouldn’t have made any team younger. I was disappointed, exhausted and without work habits. After years of being the boss, I didn’t want to become an employee. Depression and fear wouldn’t let me concentrate on anything. I was hurtling into an unstoppable spiral of destruction. Whatever I touched, I ruined. I managed to forget or miss even the one deadline I had known about long in advance. I kept returning to the past, to mistakes and their causes. I blamed everyone but myself. It was a big slap in the face from life, after which I gave up.

I came to terms with it and suddenly I didn’t care what would happen next. If the end is to come, let it come as soon as possible. I sought comfort in alcohol and drugs. At least then I could forget reality for a while – convinced that it wouldn’t last long. I would never have dreamed that this very self-destructive life would become the beginning of a new path.

I had no idea that God had completely different plans for me.

A Stay in Darkness

When the fundamental turning point in my life came, I was not entirely in my right mind. I often sat aimlessly at the computer googling all sorts of nonsense. I accepted my decline as a fact and, in an effort to help my own self-destruction, I drank regularly. Of course, I always overdid it, which also showed in my actions.

On the internet I came across the experiences of people who had undergone a stay in darkness – dark therapy. A person is shut away for several days in complete silence and darkness. In the Czech Republic, its pioneer MUDr. Urbiš achieves amazing results with it.

It must have caught my interest a lot, because in the morning I found in my mailbox a confirmation of an online payment, a completed booking for the stay and some notes. Only then did I recall a phone call from the previous day. Check-in on 6 February 2014, in three days’ time. Pyramida, Český Krumlov, Czech Republic.

To this day I don’t know why I made that decision. I let myself be shut into silence and darkness for a full ten days. And to make it even more demanding, I had the food, which they normally bring every morning, delivered on request – only when I was hungry. I immediately lost all sense of time. I didn’t know how long I had been there or how long I would stay. One room, ten days, silence and darkness. I won’t write about how I experienced the stay – but I recommend it to everyone. In the darkness I had enough time to reflect on the past. I realised many things for which there is no time in everyday life. My perception of my inner world, my own spirit and ego changed.

In the darkness, various mental and withdrawal states alternated, trains of thought, sleep and wakefulness, and later also meditation, which I entered quite naturally and in which I tried to stay as long as possible. How to get out of the cycle of decline and live a full and meaningful life? How to fill my life with joy and love instead of the hell I was going through?

After a while I began to look at my past as an impartial observer. Paradoxically, it was the effort to understand everything that prevented me from understanding it. I looked at the past without prejudice and emotion. It was important to come to terms with it, draw a thick line under it and forget.

Meeting God

When I got past the breaking point of the stay, answers began to come. Very subtly at first. I began to perceive a hint of something strange – incomprehensible noises, faint flashes, something that had not been in the space before. Gradually it turned into a more stable, moving form of light, which, however, vanished the moment I turned my attention to it.

I thought it was just a vision, a consequence of the stay in darkness. I put it out of my mind – and the light appeared again. Again I became alert and the light disappeared. It came back the moment I forgot about it. This repeated several times.

I decided that next time I wouldn’t react. The hardest part, however, was letting it go. It took a while for the form of light to appear again. It came from somewhere behind me, slowly and carefully, in constant motion. It was accompanied by increasingly distinct sounds; it grew larger and surrounded my entire perception with light. Yet it illuminated nothing. My attention could no longer influence what was happening. Suddenly, completely realistically, in front of me, behind me, in fact everywhere, I saw an abstract, constantly changing spatial entity. Every moment it looked different, full of colourful details and shapes. It shone in many colours – some I had never seen before – and was constantly transforming in space. It was light without photons.

I felt that it was trying to communicate with me. In the studio silence there were strange noises, waves, sounds without decibels. I didn’t hear them with my ears; I perceived them with my whole body. As if they came from within me.

Slowly and clearly I made out words that kept repeating:

Return to yourself… to your essence… devote yourself to the body… open your eyes… continue what you started… create space!

I heard it quite clearly, I just didn’t understand it. Completely illogical symbols, like some kind of cliché. What body? Should I start doing sport? What does that have to do with me?

The images were even more mysterious. In the play of light I began to recognise female bodies. They approached me from somewhere far away, from all sides, in groups and individually. Beautiful naked female bodies. Without eyes, motionless, as if arranged in erotic poses and rigidity. As they came closer, their arms, legs and part of their heads gradually disappeared – and what remained of them turned into mummies. Or into something that resembled mummies. Dozens, perhaps hundreds of mummies were followed by the faces of unknown people, resembling carnival masks. Heads without bodies, heads with a real gaze, some with closed eyes. In constant motion, the mummies took on extremely intense, rich colours with a high, almost mirror-like gloss. It seemed to me that I had seen these images somewhere before.

And with that, still the same words. The sequence of images repeated each time in a different form and order, but the point was the same:

Don’t search for anything! Create space! What you see exists only within you…

I came to. I didn’t know whether I had been asleep. Was it a dream? Well, fine, but enough fooling around! So much different information. What body? Return where, to myself? And naked women on top of that. It made no logical sense to me.

When I think hard about something, I usually can’t remember it. And again – the effort to understand something logically prevented me from understanding it. It was clear to me that I was circling around something that called for an explanation and that could give my life a new meaning. It came gradually, like a puzzle.

Casts

The truth is that all my life I had been drawn to fine art. Since childhood I had drawn, illustrated, painted and modelled – I devoted myself to all its forms. I loved it. My whole life revolved around fine art: eight years at an art school for children, four years at a secondary art school, six years at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design (VŠVU). In my final year, however, I let myself be lured by the developing advertising market, its opportunities and, of course, the money. That was the end of art for me.

Now and then I remembered the creative plans and ambitions from my studies, which ended so quickly in exchange for a complete illusion called ADVERTISING. It was always a very bitter memory.

The images in the darkness took on a fully realistic form and a concrete appearance. In the white masks I began to recognise faces with precise details. But these are not masks. They are sculptures.

I understood everything when I realised they were plaster casts of faces. A face cast is a work of art created by copying a face into a setting material.

It was the plaster face of some woman, one of many that I had once made for a friend in the dormitory during university. And then another and another… I had completely forgotten about it. During my studies I occasionally did this – for a bottle of wine and some small change. I enjoyed it. To this day, someone I know tells me they have a cast I once made for them. But the sheer volume of graphic design commissions overwhelmed my artistic attempts back then. The images I saw in the darkness reminded me of the period just before my “bad” decision.

Things began to clear up and the perceived cliché was suddenly understandable. That was the breakthrough. BINGO. The information from the darkness was completely accurate. Incredibly literal.

The path ahead of me was clear. I would devote myself to casts of human bodies. To fine art – an activity that was once my childhood dream and the vision of my youth. Just before fulfilling it, I had turned off and let myself be seduced by the illusion of commercial success. Now I was motivated and determined.

Today I know that the mummies symbolised the casting process itself, in which a body covered with plaster bandages really does resemble a mummy. The poses were exactly the ones I later saw when casting bodies… and the colours were exactly the same. Many other connections were revealed to me as well.

I came back from the darkness changed. In ten days I lost almost ten kilos and felt much better. It had a healing effect. Real darkness and silence. Such an experience leaves indelible marks that only I know about. Darkness introduces you to your inner self – or to something indescribable. A meeting with God. You can’t forget it, and you can’t explain it either.

After returning, I immediately started looking for information. I googled, watched, calculated. I tried to find out as much as possible. The big surprise was that it is a very rare form of artistic expression – essentially an activity with no competition far and wide. In Europe someone does it here and there, more often in the United States. Mostly, however, these are casts of hands, babies’ hands or pregnant bellies – more gift items than works of art. I had found a new goal in life: to make a living from art. From real art.

My head had cleared, but the conditions for making it happen were not favourable at all. As a trained sculptor I had a precise idea of how a studio should work, but I lacked the premises, the equipment and the money. All I had left were some workshop tools from the time when I was building a family house.

After returning from the darkness, I gradually repaired my relationships – all that could be repaired. First with friends, later also with my former family and in-laws.

I persuaded an acquaintance – a beauty, a former Playmate – to come for a visit. At home in the garage I tried to make my first mould. A complete fiasco. The whole mould fell apart because I had used a material that didn’t hold together once it set. To top it all off, a photographer friend of mine was there and documented the whole mistake.

She was willing to try it once more. This time I didn’t want to risk anything and made the mould from plaster bandages. But she went through hell – when removing the mould I completely waxed her body. All the hairs stayed stuck in the mould…

It was clear to me that it wouldn’t be that easy. Obstacles appeared at every step, and the worst were the unexpected ones. The body cast itself, however, turned out amazingly. Practically immediately I could see what was possible and what needed improving. Trial and error. Information was very hard to come by, because nobody had this kind of experience. As the darkness had hinted, I had to invent everything from scratch: the operation itself, production, presentation, sales, marketing – and above all, premises. These were absolutely essential. At the same time, I realised I had no way of paying for them. After all, I wasn’t earning anything. I had spent my last reserves.

I searched, googled again, made phone calls. I knew I needed a studio, and I also knew I couldn’t afford one. Nevertheless, I went to viewings to get my bearings. Maybe some miracle would happen.

The Studio

Once, while wandering randomly through an industrial complex, I discovered a space that completely spoke to me. A former carpentry workshop. The complex was guarded, the space in a dilapidated state – rotten windows, no heating – but it was empty. The windows urgently needed replacing, and electricity and heating had to be installed.

The manager told me the premises were vacant, nobody wanted them and, if I wanted, I could move in straight away. I had nothing to pay with. To this day I don’t know how I managed to convince him, but he let me operate there off the books for two years – without rent and without paying for energy. At my own risk and without wanting anything in return. Only after two years, when an audit by the owner from Prague was expected, did we have to legalise my stay in the studio.

Money was always short. What I earned went to my children or to materials. I was financially drained and had to solve it by selling my cottage and taking out a loan. I started renovating the studio and working on the pieces. When you start something like that, a chain reaction of circumstances begins – one thing leads to another. Once a friend just called me and offered me plastic windows. They weren’t bad or old; he just didn’t like their colour. By chance they were exactly the size and number I needed. Shelving, shelves, a cooker, a fridge – I came by many things that ended up in the studio in a similar way. The highlight was a Straka designer sofa whose purchase price was many times higher than the cost of the studio including the renovation. My acquaintance simply stopped liking it.

People around me noticed the new business quite quickly. Former acquaintances, clients and colleagues learned about my work from Facebook and the website, which I had been working on from the very beginning. I received my first big sculpture commission from a friend who came to see me at the studio. He had never seen any of my sculptures before. POÉMA – a free-standing, larger-than-life female nude for outdoors. I presented the concept to him and he agreed. He paid for the whole sculpture in advance – and never came to collect it. Not even after my many reminders.

My life moved into the studio, where I spent all my time. I approached former acquaintances and tried to persuade them to collaborate. My clientele changed completely. Advertising managers, account managers and marketing directors were replaced by the most beautiful ladies in their prime. Models, playmates, rich wives, beauty queens, porn actresses – their naked bodies became the models for new works.

Entrepreneurs, art collectors, oligarchs and, to a large extent, people from the adult industry began to take an interest in my work.

Still, not everything went smoothly. It was challenging to find and fine-tune the technology so that the casting process was manageable for the model. Gradually I discovered the possibilities and potential. Every sculpture was an experiment. Many, to my great regret, ended up broken at the rubbish dump. It didn’t matter at all – I devoted myself fully to sculpture.

Moving On

At that time, circumstances were quite favourable to me (later I understood why). I managed to arrange collaborations with several models and the number of works gradually grew. Working with the naked female body became a normal part of my life. It was necessary to keep a proper distance and not perceive the model as an erotic being. The casting process itself is quite demanding and requires maximum concentration. Soon I no longer had to look for models – many came forward on their own. For presentation I used all media channels, social networks and personal contacts.

The first client I invited to the studio bought all the sculptures on display. Even the unfinished ones – he said he didn’t mind. On top of that, he ordered another larger-than-life sculpture. After him came another and another… The process of creation, production and sales got going, and life gradually regained real value. Over time I also expanded into death masks, so besides models I also work with the dead.

I love my working environment, full of toxic, poisonous fumes. It is a smell I wouldn’t exchange even for the most luxurious office. I no longer have to throw away failed pieces. It’s enough to put them out in front of the studio and they’re gone in no time.

I have often wondered what my life would have looked like if I had taken this path right after school. There were signs, after all. The higher power that intervened in my life at the decisive moment probably knew why. As a young man who hadn’t yet sown his wild oats, with the values, lifestyle and desires I had back then, I was not ready for this profession at all. Today I know for sure: I wouldn’t have made it. I don’t even want to know how it would have turned out.

What is meant to come will come. A bad past does not mean a bad future. And it will come at the right time. It is never too late to start.

What I Understood in the Darkness

In the darkness my perception of reality as such changed completely.

I understood that I am not a team player. My individuality doesn’t allow it. I have never had a boss in my life and I never had to respect any authority at work. If I want to function in life, it has to be in a way I create myself. And the possibilities are unlimited. In the darkness there is enough time to analyse everything, so one can arrive at very interesting insights. Connections that come together there have no chance in the ordinary world.

The most frustrating realisation was that the things in my life that turned out worst were precisely those I wanted to bring to a successful end at any cost. Excessive energy always led to a negative result. Any pressure on circumstances triggered natural resistance that didn’t allow things to be brought to the right end. And what I didn’t consider important turned out successfully. Only what we decide is important is important. This difference showed throughout my whole life.

Never force it. Don’t try to set the direction by competing with someone else or against the natural resistance of circumstances – they will always tell you in advance how an activity will turn out.

I understood that the goal of any self-improvement must not be a more comfortable life or sliding into an endless pursuit of entertainment. Nor surrounding yourself with lots of expensive and useless things. And certainly not comparing or competing with anyone.

I love solitude. Only then do miracles happen around me. It has nothing to do with loneliness.

— Slavomír Gibej