Emma Srncová

* 1942

  • "I'm lying in bed, morning or night, and I'm watching a movie. And I wonder what I'd like. Or if someone comes in and I'm painting a picture for someone, it usually appears in my mind what I would like. And if it doesn't appear, I don't want to paint it. And I imagine the whole thing. I have the imagination to set up a whole room. Where everything goes and everything. So I project. That's how I lay out the whole picture of where things should be, and then I usually draw in pencil in my sketchbook the basic things that should be in the picture and where they should be. And then I actually go to the canvas. Or I prefer to paint on boards because canvas is rough and hard to paint on."

  • "Everything was incredible for us, including the castle where we played the night show. There was a gentleman who was guarding us, and he had to play with us in black as well, because we were missing people they wouldn't let go with us. We went on the stage after the Shakespeare Company, who had sand all over the stage and always had to clear it away. There were about six or eight, maybe ten of us that would go to the theatre, and there were some handsome men that would come in, made up and covered in red paint, because they were like killed. They stared and so did we. And what happened was that there was a great success and the theater took off in an incredible way."

  • "We lived in the square where the reform was taking place. I know that at that time some people were tearing down a bronze statue of Masaryk from the theatre. They were hitting it. It was terrible. My mother would rush us all away from the window and say, 'Please don't go near the window.' In the end it turned out that the police or the secret service had been filming it all. And they evicted all the people who were excitedly looking out the window from Pilsen."

  • Celé nahrávky
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    Praha, 22.12.2023

    (audio)
    délka: 02:21:24
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of the 20th Century TV
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As long as I paint and I keep my mind sharp, I‘ll be happy

Emma Srncová in her youth
Emma Srncová in her youth
zdroj: witness´s archive

Emma Srncová, née Macenauerová, was born to her parents Bedřich and Eliška on 22 August 1942 in Prague. She spent the first years of her life with her parents in Pilsen, where she witnessed the liberation by the Americans and the riots during the currency reform in the 1950s. After moving to Prague, she studied at grammar school, where two women approached her during gym class to start working as a model. She participated in shows in Czechoslovakia and abroad, for example in Baghdad and Kiev. She had a daughter Lucie with her first husband Vladimír Navrátil. With her second husband, Jiří Srnec, she had children Jan and Barbora. Her second marriage inspired her artistically and she worked together with her husband in the Black Theatre. After her divorce, she began to paint professionally. She held over 170 exhibitions around the world. Her third husband, Pavel Beránek, whom she married in 1986, died after thirty years of marriage. In 2023, Emma Srncová was living in Prague.