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 represent clips from human actions that are taken ‘out of context’ and thus acquiring their own independent meaning. They are ‘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.