The thought for the exhibition “Widn Circle” came to me spontaneously, from longing for harmony, beauty of nature, looking into the future with confidence. I present works of artists who, through their painting practice, depict nature, experimenting with 1 of the most popular themes in art past – landscape. Grażyna Smalej, who has remembered painting lakes, oceans, seas and rivers in various contexts, since his studies at the Faculty of Painting of the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow, could not miss this list. Grażyna is besides a associate of the River Sister Collective, which organizes, among others, happenings to defend rivers in Poland. He lives and works in Sopot. all day he watches the sky-water relationship, 2 simple planes with infinite amounts of views, an image of a continuous change, which is the only constant rule of the world. It calms her, strengthens her, fascinates her.
Marta Krajenta: Looking at your work you can get the impression that it is dominated by the motive of water. Remember the first time you painted water?
Grażyna Smalej: I was raised in a place where water was for medicine, in the summertime we had no place to swim, to lakes far away, to the sea even further, and only a tiny guardian of Vilnianka passed through the village, from which we drank delicious water, but we never managed to bring it to water. There was quite a few water missing. I've always dreamed of surviving by the sea. But specified a painting phrase on the subject of hydro was a spontaneous bath during a hot outdoor in Nabuzhany Pienkov, about 20 years ago. I became aware of the phenomenon of water, and how large is the feeling of happiness, erstwhile our bodies bond with its matter, become light and are relieved, it is like a return to the mother's body. This is how my “Self-Solution” cycle began, in which I sought an expression for this blissful minute of joy, which is why in this cycle human characters were so crucial to me immersed, floating, amused children. respective twelve or more works in this series were created. I studied the forms and shapes of superb substance urgently – transparency, but at the same time mirrored reflection, shadows, own colour and the colour of the surroundings – fascinating painting challenges.
Last year we presented spectacular, large-format paintings illustrating the oceans at your individual “About Happiness” exhibition at Flow Art House, and at the present exhibition you can admire the manifestations of the Baltic under your brush. What are you trying to tell us now?
Grażyna Smalej / image in the studioThis past year, I've been celebrating moving to the sea, and my dreams have come true. Since I can remember all journey to the Baltic Sea, starting from childhood, it was just a holiday, a large event that I experienced very strongly. Now I wake up all day and I see the horizon of the bay, the ships on the riverbed and the large sky. Christmas is all day! Everything is fresh and different from Krakow, where I spent 25 years of my life. “Did you not turn an axe into a stick?” my father asked me, who was already very sick and could not visit me in a fresh home, so I tried to tell him about my place in Sopot. “Dad, I have so much heaven here!” I started without much thought. An open perspective, a sky and quite a few light – this is something that touches me the most now and what can be seen in my Baltic images from the last year as part of the exhibition “Widn Circle”. I've brightened up the palette, all the paintings before seem besides dark to me now. There truly is light, brightness and a peculiar distraction in moist air and rainbows! I got rainbows!
A longing for the large water made you decide to decision out of Krakow to the Baltic?
There were many reasons for moving, but longing to be on the beach and behind the sea air was 1 of the most crucial arguments. I was reasoning about the ocean, I wanted to live on it, but I am attached to Poland, to people who talk Polish. We live in language. In my beloved fresh “Alef”, Jorge Luis Borges wrote “All language is an alphabet of symbols, its usage is based on the past that the interviewer shares”. If I moved to the ocean to Portugal or anywhere else, I would lose that connection to the past, especially since I am handicapped erstwhile it comes to learning abroad languages, I have no hearing. That's why I chose the Polish sea, which may not have the scale, the magnitude of the Atlantic, but it has a smell, and the ocean does not smell, it is besides more than a bath-friendly ocean and most crucial – it has an infinite amount of shades of grey, blue and green. I've never seen another sea like this change color!
What do you think about walking on the beach all day? What does water symbolize in your painting?
The most dominating thing for me on the shore of the ocean or the sea is that you can get free of all thoughts and be here and now. Water is simply a large place to meditate, or think about nothing, and is simply a perfect place to think about everything. The component itself has an infinite number of calculate by its variability and motility. likewise with the symbolic side – it can be a symbol of life and death, pleasance and suffering. “The sea is all one”, as Zbigniew Jankowski wrote, my most close poet, the sailor, who besides lives in Sopot. "Every 1 – but like in a magic ball you collect what you sow with an open eye". So, with my open eye, I choose what is clear—the flickering sun on the water arranged in the constellation, the light on the large surface of the bay seen from the cliff in the Eagle, the sun in the clear sky in moist air and the union of water and fire—the rainbow! I'm practicing with the light multiplying, I'm looking for the expression, and I feel like I'm painting for the first time, like I've seen the sea, the waves and the first glow. "I can't paint. I'm just learning," I thought painting dots on the image "Photos. The Baltic” and I enjoyed being a child, although I improved the image many times and took me quite a few time. I'm certain it would be easy for the baby to show lightness and pure color. Puentilists, specified as George Seurat and Paul Signac, who, by the way, painted mainly views of water in the main role, most likely provoked by moist air splitting the light in a peculiar way, had to devote quite a few work to build these flickering planes. Dots let you to get the impression of this unfurled blinding light – the difficulty is to keep the colours clean in the right strength and this is simply a large challenge, you gotta watch out with each single brush trail. Joyful images, light in reception, cost the most effort. I'm all the more attracted to this difficulty.
These paintings captivate a palette of colours, with single brush strokes you paint a unique minute – the movement of water and light.
Compared to the ocean cycle, in this Baltic series I focus more on detail. Brushing a brush is simply a very tiny touch, like never before. Especially in the views of the bay of Orlov, where I painted single flashes of light on a immense pane. This biggest Bay was painted 3 months, possibly longer, evidence time for my temperament. I had to, and I wanted to track the dot by the dot as the bay opens to the sun erstwhile the day rises. It took and gentle, and attention, and time, and a very thin brush. I change painting conventions due to the fact that I am looking for an answer to light – it is simply a unique sunlight in drops of water in the air and on a pantry of wrinkled water. Fire and water – I think I will call this series, I think of it. In addition to the oceans, I showed watercolors with the Sun – abstract, minimalistic, colorful. “Sun is simply a god!” was expected to be the last words of an excellent sailor painter, William Turner. The sun gives birth to colors, vision, light, and at night all cats are black. The sun is power, fascinating. And how the Baltic with the Sun works, I observe carefully and I give, as I can, sometimes through realistic mapping, sometimes through emotional treatment of the subject.
Water is simply a large creative inspiration to you. It is wonderful that you are besides active in the socio-artistic action “Sisters of the River” and act in defence of maintaining chaotic rivers in Poland. Tell me about this project.
The collection of Sisters of the River is primarily a concept of Cecilia Malik, a Krakow visual artist and performer with whom I have been friends for a long time, since my studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow and I am a large fan of her. Cecilia is the originator of the happenings, both the visual luminaire and the content page of the protests, thanks to cooperation with experts from the Coalition Let us rescue the River, which is part of the River Sisters. I have the honour of being a associate of this group of women, artists, colleagues, activists whom Cecilia created, in order to save Polish rivers, spreading burning problems through happenings and protests. This year the River Sisters will celebrate the 5th anniversary of the uprising. During this time, I learned a lot about rivers, dams and all about the situation of water in Poland, I saw the incredible origin of these blue protests carefully prepared by a group of girls-activists and experienced something that I think happened on the occasion, apart from the first imagination of Cecilia, namely sisterhood. This hydrofeminist collective is simply a genuinely supportive, caring group. We are able to celebrate, celebrate and have a large time together erstwhile something bad happens with rivers, forests, and we are able to celebrate, celebrate and have a large time together, and we get very close all day. And there are girls from very different backgrounds, working professionally in many areas, and it's beautiful how a squad is self-created for a peculiar task with a peculiar project, and each sister is active with her own superpowers. We win in large actions, specified as the last Art Auction #DRAVE Oder! to contribute to the social recovery plan of the river after the disaster. We have raised a truly large amount for the Coalition Let us save the Rivers and as I watched this incredible mobilization of the girls, and I was in the initiating team, I felt a large joy – this unselfishness, dedication, sitting at nights at thousands of emails and posts – building strength and religion in perpetration! I am very glad that I crossed the threshold of my hermit painting studio and entered the ellipse of River Sisters, amazing women who change the world.
What inspires you in art? Whose creativity is the most affecting you?
It's changing a lot. Depends on what I'm focusing on, what I'm going through, what I'm going to see. For example, the rainbow phenomenon, which I now see outside the bay window a 100 times more frequently than in Krakow, and which is simply a miracle of color, the basic motif in children's paintings, a symbol of hope, the union of Earth with heaven, and which I started painting in consequence to the fear of the Russian invasion of Ukraine a year ago, this phenomenon was the subject of my investigation in painting. There are many rainbow depictions starting with the Pompeian mosaic, through the medieval and Renaissance sacral paintings, through Rubens, ending with the Landart (Andy Goldsworthy), but in painting itself, the rainbow, the rigid colors, are so illustrated, they do not have the softness of passing and glowing as in nature. Only the luminosity of the spectrum was found in Sonia Delauney's paintings, which were occupied by light and color. I like her paintings very much. But rainbows in art inactive look and experimentation in the studio over my own representation.
Recently, for a star, I presented a beautifully released catalogue of the ongoing exhibitions at the Luis Vuitton Foundation in Paris, "Claude Monet – Joan Mitchell, Dialogue". This summary of the impressionist, who reached abstraction in his fresh works with nenufares and the expressive abstractionist, which reached the landscape, is excellent. Light and colour derived from the nature of the scenery they both surrounded – Monet in Giverny, Mitchell in Vétheuil, is wonderfully shown and the combination of these 2 attitudes – painting the “features” of the Monet and the “feelings” of Mitchell, gives an image of a powerful working nature thanks to abstractness. Abstractness is the force of art, including the 1 representing it. Mitchell utilized to say, "My paintings are abstractions, but besides landscapes." It is in my search for answers to this fresh scenery that surrounds me that painting of both is very significant. Many years ago I visited Giverny, where the garden with a pond at the studio was for Monet the last place to live and paint, where nenufares were created from this regular observation. I like to think sometimes immodestly that I have here on the bay, under the forest, my Giverny (Laughter).
For a year now, in looking at the sea, in its understanding, I have been accompanied by poems by Zbigniew Jankowski mentioned earlier. I received his book with the poesy “Food All” from my favourite poet and friend Margaret Lebdy with the marked poem “Moving to advanced Sopot” (1970s) and it was a revelation. Jankowski is an highly delicate and full of vitality. The titles themselves of his poems or collections are an experience – “Warning from the Land”, “The Burden of the Sea”, “The Law of the Bay”, “About the Fragrance of Space”, “The Reflecting Bottom”. He's been swimming on ships on the oceans, knows his work on boats, has lived in Sopot since the 1970s, and if you meditate on the beach, it's only with his poems. He is besides the author of the anthology "The Sea of Polish poets", from which I draw inspiration and find in it statements confirming the community of naval intuitions, as in the voices of Anna Świrszczyńska or Anna Kamieńska. poesy and painting seem to me an appropriate consequence to the sensations and feelings of the most important, overwhelming, which prose does not include. It inspires me and saves me. My light ellipse is now lit up like never before.
*For the “Widn Circle” exhibition we invitation you to Flow Art home until March 19. In addition to the paintings of Grażyna Smaly, the exhibition besides includes paintings by Aleksandra Batura, Joanna Dudek, Kamila Kraus and Juliusz Kosin. They all take on the subject of nature, presenting it in a minimalist, contemporary installment.
