Hearing and drawing medium from Nýdek Memory of Mr. Josef Labaj and not only of him
So-called mediumistic drawings have attracted and fascinated me since my youth. Several of them hung in my parents’ house in Ostrava-Radvanice. Previously, the editorial staff of the Spiritistická revue magazine was located there, and the editors Jan Kuchař and Jan Rösner lived and worked there. By the way, Josef Kotzian / Kocián, a famous drawing medium, lived in the house next to him. I have always imagined how invisible beings, who are on a higher vibrational and spiritual level than us, work through the drawing medium, creating those amazing, perfect, incredible fantasy lines, forms and symbols. I was also fascinated by the existence of the drawing medium themselves, although I personally knew only one thing, Mr. Josef Labaj from the small mountain town of Nýdek in the Jablunkov region, where the Czech Republic forms a border triangle with Poland and Slovakia. Mr. Josef Labaj was a medium of drawing and hearing at the same time, and my parents and I visited spiritualistic sessions at home several times in the 1970s and 1980s. He once mentioned to me that he would need a new set of special black and colored pencils for his medium work, because he was running out. I offered him that whenever I had a trip to Prague, I would buy them for him in a specialized art supply store for professional artists a short distance from Divadelní Street, which runs along the Vltava River from the National Theater to Charles Bridge. This has happened several times. An unforgettable experience for me was when I was present in his medium drawing sometime in 1977-78. He was not in a visible trance, he was talking to me, looking at me, and at the same time his hand was drawing a picture with perfectly precise and fine lines. It was incomprehensible and fascinating to me. How can a hand draw on its own without eye control? What does a creature holding his hand look like? Why did she choose this person as the medium? Due to his total commitment during the war, he only had a basic education, after the war until his retirement he worked by hand in Třinecké železárny and as an artist he had never shown or educated himself before. I knew more about the talking medium, in the family and in a group of family friends: Uncle Miloš Grossmann from Paskov, Mr. Rudolf Surma from Ostrava-Radvanice, whom my brother and I called Uncle Rudolf, and Uncle Jaroslav Lýsek from Ostrava. I also met one seeing medium: Mrs. Božena Surmová from Ostrava-Radvanice, whom we called Aunt Božka. I also met several writing mediums. A significant writing medium was my distant aunt Emilie Kajfoszová from Nýdek. To a lesser extent, this skills were also devoted to aunts Žofka Grossmannová from Paskov, Anna Purkertová from Milotice, Zuzana Lýsková from Ostrava and the wife of Mr. Josef Labaj – A. Labajová. But also my mother Štěpánka Grossmannová had a disposition to write mediumity in her youth, but for serious health reasons she could not devote herself to it. Ever since I experienced Mr. Josef Labaj as a drawing medium at work, I have felt an even stronger respect and admiration for medium drawings and I need to have them on the walls around me. As a composer of so-called classical music, I have experienced an ecstatic situation on my own several times, when composing a song suddenly went naturally to me, as if someone had dictated to me, and I almost didn’t have time to write it down. But I was not a medium. Not even a composer. On the other hand, I often feel the presence of inspiring beings both in composing and translating the wonderful spiritual texts of the White Brotherhood by Master Petr Danov from Bulgaria. Jan Grossmann |