Anna Zemánková: Translating Grief and Music into Dreamlike Drawings

Anna Zemánková would listen to the music of Leoš Janáček while drawing, Jennifer Higgie tells us in a piece to be published this month.

After Janáček's daughter died, he had transformed her last words into melodies.

By 'giving shape' to these notes, Zemánková not only translated the music into another medium but found a way to process the death by cancer of her own son.

It's a remarkable example of how even art as wild and idiosyncratic as Zemánková's dreamlike drawings, which seem so much the products of private imaginative speculation, can also be understood as (in part) the creative interpretation of shared human experiences.