I was born in 1948 in Zamosc, the Renaissance town in south-east Poland, where I studied

at the local art college. In 1967 I began studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. In

1974, a year after graduation, I moved to London and after a brief spell at a cartoon studio,

having seen the opportunity and financial rewards, decided to work in advertising. The work

schedule allowed me little time for painting and I exhibited rarely throughout that period,

and accordingly my way of creative self-discovery took a round route.

 

At the same time, having direct contact with the multicultural society and a chance to learn

about their historical and religious backgrounds I wanted to convey through painting the

relevance of faith in the context of the physical universe via two parallel angles, the visual

and the narrative. A common theme running through my work was time as a perspective,

and I presented the ideas using time marking by means of introducing elements relating to

ancient beliefs, artefacts from some cultures, masks or types of clothes, and elements from

master paintings of the past. Later on I was preoccupied with the exploration of expressive

possibilities in portraiture derived from digital image manipulation. The result of this process

of figurative transformation was disfiguration. In the series of portraits, masks, caricatures,

the features of which have been exaggerated to intensify attributes or emotions or the lack

of them, I aimed to achieve the desired expression or mood, with historical, cultural and

social undertones – the world within exposed or disguised in frozen ‘temporariness’.

 

In 2016 I returned to my country and decided to settle in Krakow, the city of historical and

artistic tradition. The political climate and social questions had an overwhelming effect on

me as various forces, not necessarily friendly to my country, were trying to gain influence

and make Poland ‘a God’s playground’ again. However, and to my surprise, I’ve discovered

here in the streets among hundreds of people, many of them tourists, the subject matter –

a world beyond ‘the mainstream’ that seemed something I was looking for, and decided to

make a series of paintings I call “Reminiscences” depicting people in various circumstances,

un-posed actions, coincidental or enigmatic postures, or taken by surprise. These paintings

are urban landscapes, often devoid of architecture, where urban perspective forming spatial

illusion becomes a human perspective. They represent clips from human actions that are

taken ‘out of context’ and thus acquire their own independent meaning. They’re ‘a neutrino

world’ of a kind.

 

Time envelopes all subjects that interest me: the seasons, memory, reality versus illusion,

inner world of the mind, movement (likewise a lack of it) as an existence in time, and the

form of expression, the language of ambiguity.