Prompted by Branka Šćulac, the head-waitress in Hotel Kaštel, I regaled the hotel owners with two of my boards painted on both sides. A year later, the paintings were placed in the hotel lobby right next to the reception desk. Igor Legović, the hotel director, asked me to come up with a short biography in Croatian and English to put under the two boards. Which is what I immediately did, hoping to meet a few visitors of the hotel over the years. Here goes the English version of the biography:

Ranko Bon writes and paints. He lives in Motovun since 2003. One of his books concerns his painting. Entitled “Cave Art Now” (2003), it can be found on the World Wide Web on his Ca’ Bon Gallery website (www.cabongallery.org). Geometric art connects paintings found in paleolithic caves and the work of Mondrian, Malevich, and Kandinsky from the early decades of the Twentieth Century. As a writer and painter, Bon is concerned with continuity rather than originality.

So far, not a single hotel visitor has contacted me via the gallery website, which provides all the relevant information about my whereabouts, including a prominent link to my Residua website. Even though I spend quite a bit of time in the hotel lobby on hot days when the hotel terrace is crowded with tourists, I have not seen a single visitor cast a look at the paintings, let alone gaze at them with interest before reading my biography. Stark and otherworldly as my paintings undoubtedly are, they are of no interest whatsoever to hotel visitors that come from all over the world. To this day, the only one who gazes at my paintings when no-one is looking is myself. Ouch! In my place, most humans would see themselves as complete and total losers. But this is how I actually see my fellow humans. Complete and total losers one and all. Alleluia!