The cycle of ballpoint pen drawings “Bad News” originates in the author´s long lasting interest in the world of mass media. The first works were created in the summer of 1997 when the big part of Europe was affected by huge floods and people were constantly bombarded by bad news both from home and abroad. Approximately at the same time the author got to know the key texts of the mass media theory experts – Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman. The title of the cycle itself then comes from Zappa´s text Trouble every day.

Formally, the works create a completed entity, their topics being just loosely connected. The world of media is in terms of Postman´s ideas understood as “a kaleidoscope” in whose field of vision the individual pictures emerge, they stop for a short moment before the eyes of a spectator and disappear again immediately. The sketchy fragmented characteristics is also demonstrated by the fact that the drawings don´t have any common names – there is always just a brief time detail with each of them, referring to e.g. TV news or video recordings. Despite his fascination by the media world the author used traditional art procedures, e.g. while enlarging newspaper photographs which served as loose blueprints for the drawings, he didn´t work with a computer but with the classical square net; he didn´t make the creating process easier for him at any stage by using modern technologies. He made his drawings with the help of a ruler and special ballpoint pens by layering the individual lines, one on another, with the maximum possible preciseness; the result thus looks like a digital picture or computer graphics etc. The author then developed the same technique in several following cycles.