Bohumil Eliáš st. (1937–2005) was one of the most prominent figures in the context of the Czech studio glass scene of the 20th century, a creator who, with his multifaceted original work, entered the world context of modern artistic glassmaking as an unmistakable author and respected artistic personality.

Eliáš's natural artistic talent developed through his studies at SUPŠ sklářská in Železný Brod, then in 1957–1963 in the studio of monumental painting and glass of prof. Josef Kaplický at the University of Applied Arts in Prague. Here he had time to develop his painterly perception and from the beginning a dynamic style of working with color, but at the same time

the author's focus on glass was also won. In the future, this interconnection of artistic areas has permanently determined the essence of Elijah's artistic work. A major milestone for the development of his glass work was the year 1975. For the realization of windows to the Gothic church

He used the Virgin Mary as the first principle of horizontal layering of shapes carved from flat glass. This exceptionally effective way of working with glass was subsequently used in a number of monumental realizations in architecture. At the same time, the layering of glass plates became one of the main positions of his private creation of loose glass sculptures. At first, they were based on the play of plastic shapes, modeled by shattering refractions of light at the edges. From the beginning of the 1990s, however, he began to apply painting on individual layers to create the effect of the illusion of deep interior spaces in the mass of the block. He reduced shapes to simple cylinders or prisms modified by grinding. This created a kind of stela, monumental in its silent austerity.

The painterly feeling formed the unifying basis of Elijah's artistic personality, and therefore, in addition to his work from glass, he also moved in the painterly position. Until the mid-1980s, both positions had their specific and different expressions. Both artistic paths merged into a new form in 1985, when he had the opportunity to apply his dramatic painting to blown hollow shapes. Works began to emerge, using a spatial form of glass shape for painting and applying its specific lighting properties. For Elijah, these works meant the final connection of the painter's position with the glass sculpture.

The starting point of Elijah's painted glass objects-paintings has been bent and embossed flat glass plates since the 1990s. The glass shape became the bearer of painted compositions, using all the diversity of the author's original expression. The glass enabled the painting to embrace space, brought into it the magical light play of glazes and the three-dimensional development into imaginative spaces outside the reality of the object itself.

From its beginnings, the artistic work of Bohumil Eliáš has been a natural eruption of the need to create. He did not look for new forms for the mere specialization of his work. He chose unusual practices and connections intuitively because he felt them were necessary to fulfill his idea. He fully enjoyed the expressive colors and variety of shapes. The author's more than forty-year-old and extremely fruitful artistic career closed abruptly, at the moment when he began to develop new forms of his work with his famous explosive intoxication from his work, he formed another different expression in glass and painting. His sculptures and paintings will be preserved in the collections of dozens of our and foreign, public and private collections as works of an exceptionally inventive and solitary world-class artist.

Mgr. Ivo Křen, curator of the glass collection of the East Bohemian Museum in Pardubice