Résumé

I was born in Budapest in 1954. My composer father played piano and my mother, a potter, with clay, while I kept trying my manual skills without any restraint, until I started school. There my left-handedness was not tolerated; I was taught to write with my right, a constraint which hindered me for a long time in finding my way.

Although I studied them at university, I never taught Hungarian or Russian. Instead I was by turns a window cleaner, translator, interpreter, tour guide, publisher’s editor, and ethnographer studying Gypsies.

In 1990 I took the opportunity to illustrate a book of Gypsy tales that we were just working on. That was the turning point at which I started to paint. In doing so I received professional advice from two artists: János Miklós Kádár and József Szentgyörgyi.

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Gábor Grabócz died in May 2017.