Bohumil Cenkl, 72, Was Artist and Math Professor

Bohumil (Mila) Cenkl of Waban, a part-time resident of Harthaven in Oak Bluffs and Mittersill, N.H., died Thursday, May 4. He was 72.

Mila loved the mountains of New England and the waters around Martha's Vineyard. A professor of mathematics at Northeastern University and an artist, he often painted and exhibited on the Island. Time spent across the Vineyard and at Harthaven in particular over the past several decades provided him with boundless inspiration. Mila's paintings immerse the viewer into the very essence of the natural environment and communicate his deep feelings about the subject of his work - the Vineyard was his palette and is his gallery.

In Mila's own words: "A painting that does not evoke emotions is just a collage of colors. The joy of looking at a painting should bring feelings that endure and stay with a person for a long time."

His paintings and drawings are on display in various collection in the Czech Republic and Italy, on the Vineyard and across the United States. Last year, for Mother's Day in the Firehouse Gallery, Mila and Doug Peckham of Oak Bluffs sponsored a workshop on the painting of flowers.

Mila was born in Bohunovice, Czech Republic, on Dec. 19, 1934. He grew up as the tide of the second World War ebbed and flowed through Europe. He studied mathematics at Charles University in Prague, coming first to Princeton, N.J., in 1968 as the cresting wave of communism drove him, his wife Jirina (Gina) with his five-year-old son Michal to the United States. With his love for the ocean and the mountains Mila ultimately chose to settle the family in the Boston area in Waban, where their youngest son, Pavel, was born. Mila and Gina lived seasonally at Harthaven, Oak Bluffs, and in Mittersill, N.H.

His wife, sons and their spouses, Kim and Jen, and grandson Orion hope to continue to make the right and often difficult choices that Mila would have made so seemingly effortlessly.

Mila was deliberate, courageous and unique in everything he did. An admirer of the poetry of Robert Frost, he would have liked to have ended this article with following:

"In winter in the woods alone Against the trees I go. I mark a maple for my own And lay the maple low. At four o'clock I shoulder ax, And in the afterglow I link a line of shadowy tracks Across the tinted snow. I see in Nature no defeat In one tree's overthrow Or for myself in my retreat For yet another blow."

In lieu of flowers, remembrances may be made in Mila's name to the Scleroderma Foundation, 300 Rosewood Drive, Suite 105, Danvers, MA 01923 (www.scleroderma.org).