Ranný's landscape is his native Czech-Moravian Highland. This inherited region signed his birth certificate and clung to his soul. Or, to put it more crudely and precisely, it r ubbed itself in it. It is the region of apple-trees, bleeding at the end of summer, and of stones. The river Svratka flows through the settlement where he was born. It is to be said that the folk used to call it the Švarcava, from the German word schwarz, the black river.

Let us come back to ravens, the emblem birds of graphic art. It is tempting to talk about them when we get to know that one of the landscapes which Ranný touches with the whole of his body, surrounds a village which, by now, has merged with he town, but it still keeps a winged name:
Ptáčov /Birds’ Place/.

The autor of these lines is not an art historian. He knows that most Ranný's prints are done by drypoint technique, but he is not quite sure whether that point is as good as a needle with an eye to see. He belives it is so, it must be so, as there are so many threads and fibres interwoven. No knots, no ends, like the endless time.

What else to say without uselessly saying what the artist has already said in his idiom, in the austere black broken up into so many beautiful and sensitive greys? 

Just be silent and look. To see the primeval landscape.

Jan Skácel