Authors: Ben Ruhe
Date Submitted: August 31, 2004
Article Type: Journal

Istvan Bodoczky, of Budapest, Hungary, is a painter of beautiful abstractions. As professor of art and pedagogy at the Hungarian University of Craft and Design, he is also a committed teacher. Born into a family of lawyers, he instead chose to be an artist at the age of 14. “I’m considered a rebel by my family,” he says.

Father of three sons, he took up kiteflying in the l970s to amuse them. It was hard going for him at first because he couldn’t get his homemade kites to fly. “The children were upset, so I kept at it,” he recalls. He not only persevered, he became “obsessive,” he says. He experimented, studied books including Pelham, and duly became an expert, even writing a book on the subject in 1983. Making an old warhorse Boxkite was what finally changed things for him. “My then wife’s father had been a pilot during World War II and he suggested I make a Gibson Girl-type kite of the sort stocked on life rafts for emergencies. It flew beautifully. That was my breakthrough.”

“My pictures and kites came together when a Hungarian television crew challenged me to fly one of my oddly shaped paintings on exhibition in an art gallery. It was a work on paper framed by bamboo with a free-form, highly irregular outline. I was rather annoyed at the challenge.

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