The Attorney for the Colored Pencil

"I fell in love with colored pencils as a child. No other medium allowed me to express my dreams, so full of vibrant colors and intricate details. It wasn’t until art school that I was told a colored pencil could never create a piece of fine art. It seemed like everyone who pretended to understand art turned their nose up at them." – Marie Brožová

Since her childhood, Marie had been developing an original colored pencil technique—one so rich and saturated that it resembles oil or acrylic painting. Yet at art school, she faced deep-seated prejudices, including the dismissal that colored pencils only belong in kindergarten. Early in her career, she even had a pre-arranged exhibition canceled on the spot the moment the gallery owner realized the artworks were created with colored pencils. It became undeniable that the colored pencil needed a defender.

On the summer solstice, June 21, 2004, Marie set up her easel in Prague’s Old Town Square and began drawing her first large-scale piece on the massive A0 paper format (roughly 33 x 47 inches). Titled The Tree of Life’s Annual Ring, it launched her project In Defense of the Colored Pencil, a mission to prove that this humble medium could easily stand shoulder to shoulder with traditional master techniques.

Over the years, Marie drew 201 large-scale artworks live in public spaces across the Czech Republic and abroad. She brought her art directly to people in historic town squares, castles, châteaux, libraries, bookstores, festivals, and even shopping malls. For her unique contribution to the art world, she earned several international awards and won first place at the L'art au Soleil symposium in France. After two decades, The Defense of Colored Pencils culminated in June 2024 with her largest retrospective exhibition at Prague's historic Carolinum. 

And yet, the whole project nearly ended before it could even begin! "It seemed so simple: set up an easel in Old Town Square and show the world that I truly use nothing but colored pencils, even on the largest scale. But even for such an innocent event, a permit from the city hall was required. My husband, Martin, who has managed all my exhibitions from the start, helped me write the application. What followed was a months-long pilgrimage through a Kafkaesque castle of bureaucracy, only to receive a final rejection stating that my drawing would endanger the traffic situation in Old Town Square. Things were getting tense—the media was booked, promotions were printed, and the bureaucrats just shrugged and hid behind one another. In the end, we were saved by Mr. Vihan, the mayor of Prague 1, who took pity on us and gave the project his blessing. I just had to promise him one thing: that I wouldn’t draw on quite atrocious, fiberglass cow statues that were decorating the entire city center at the time." – Marie Brožová

In 2021, Marie’s expertise came full circle when she served as the expert consultant for the Czech edition of Pencil Workshop, the first serious textbook on colored pencil techniques by American author Sasha Prood, published by Albatros Media in collaboration with Gallery Pastelka.