ABOUT THE AUTHOR

I am a Polish painter, academic teacher, and author of  textbooks for the Polish School and Pedagogical Publishing. I also manage an art gallery. For the past year the In-spe gallery has been an itinerant institution benefiting from the hospitality of other galleries, but has retained its logo, catalog and artistic program.

Initially, I painted mannequins and faces/masks. I then turned to the figure, placed in darkness. Motes of light whirled within this figure, and gradually it began emerging into the light. Poussin, whose works I spent two months copying at the Louvre, was instrumental in this process whereby landscape became a platform where the individual encounters the environment.

I first started painting on silk in India. A monkey would come along and grab a tube of paint, or sit down next to me and watch me work. Painting on silk gave me new assistants. I work with the silk stretched taut on the ground. It's like the dance that Pollock did. The paintings are large. You have to walk around them. Often you have to step on them to see them from all angles. Top and bottom are reversed, like they are in the alchemical process. Silk is a seductive fabric. It has a sheen, it conjures up associations with the decorative, the feminine element; it's old-fashioned somehow, it denies its materiality. But I don't want to let it stay on the side of lightness. I try not to give in to that picturesque spilling-over of paint. By adding circles and borders, I tame the spilling shapes in an attempt to have an orderly composition. I'm not treating that experience as something distinct from my previous work. I believe that the medium is important, but whether you work on grey paper or on silk, it's always about one thing, and that is draughtsmanship and colour.