Jerzy Madeyski (1931-2005), a well-known Polish art historian, the author of numerous essays and critical texts in the field of art history.
According to the dry definition tradition is the transfer from generation to generation of customs, beliefs and convictions, principles, ways of seeing and feeling or behaving, and of the artistic skills. It is the continuation not only of the experience contained in knowledge and skills, but also of the world attitude lying at their foundation and thus of a certain hierarchy of values too, in the conviction that these things are good, because they have been tried and tested by many generations.
According to the dry definition tradition is the transfer from generation to generation of customs, beliefs and convictions, principles, ways of seeing and feeling or behaving, and of the artistic skills. It is the continuation not only of the experience contained in knowledge and skills, but also of the world attitude lying at their foundation and thus of a certain hierarchy of values too, in the conviction that these things are good, because they have been tried and tested by many generations.
Tradition has played an enormous role in history; and in art its contribution has often been decisive. It is no coincidence that the truly great cultures developed over many centuries or even millennia on the groundwork of a firm tradition to mention only China, which has been doing this for 6,000 years, or ancient Egypt, the peacefully evolving art of which was rocked by only one shortlived revolution in the course of well over 3,000 years. Only we in our arrogance have taken rebellion as the conditio sine qua non of true development in the arts; nowhere else except on the small area of Europe has every novelty been welcomed with applause incommensurate with its worth, only to be dismissed after some time in disgrace and relegated to the stockpile of havebeens, ideas and things no longer current or in vogue, and hence ugly and deserving contempt and oblivion.
A variety of revolutions in art has rolled over our unquiet continent. The painter and theoretician Giogrio Vasari called everything that was created in the thousand years separating the fall of the Roman Empire in the West from the outbreak of the great Renaissance an arte Gothico barbaro, thereby attributing the discovery of the purely French style lying at the origins of ‘Gothic’ to the Germanic peoples. Exactly the same befell the Renaissance, which was challenged by Mannerism and Baroque, until they too, in their turn, came to be degraded and mocked by Neoclassicism.
The wheel of art and the ideas connected with it was revolving faster and faster, until in our century it reached its apogee of revolutions. Burn down the Louvre!’ cried the Italian and French Futurists, while the Russian Constructivists reechoed their remonstrances with their own slogan of “one machine nut and bolt is of more value to us than all the collections in the Kremlin.”
Contempt for tradition has become the watchword of modern artists it just wasn’t done to be anything else but “modern.” The words “tradition”, “traditionalism”, and “traditionalist” changed their sense, and now mean “fuddyduddyl”, “a person of limited scope and incapable of creative thought and work.” Simply a sluggard, oaf, or hack pandering to the tastes of the petite bourgeoisie which, as is wellknown, “lives awfully in awful apartments” with country views on their dingy walls. With all those landscapes and nudes which show an admiration for the world and its natural beauty. In other words the banal and the cliché, for art has other, far more serious tasks to accomplish.
Thus beauty was cursed out of the vocabulary of art as a relic of the past, no longer serviceable in the new objectives. It became the artist’s aspiration rather to build new worlds and to arraign existing reality than to express approbation for it. Art shook off its roots and set out on a grand adventure.
But it was severely disappointed. Yet, it accomplished many exciting discoveries and experienced the taste of novelty, down to the bitterness of selfannihilation, only once again to appreciate the role of tradition. In this it is reminiscent of the young man in the story who says that when he was 16 he thought his father was a fool, but now at the age of 25 he is so surprised how the old fellow has grown wiser over just a couple of years.
Aleksander Żywiecki belongs to a generation already free of the pressure of the AvantGarde and its issues. He was born in 1962, when the crisis in AvantGarde ideas and art was already apparent. He grew up in the times when the famous critic Paul Restany had exclaimed, “L ‘art est mort!” and had withdrawn into the forests of South America, from where he announced his Rio Negro Manifesto, like Rousseau appealing for a return to nature and to the origins of art. He was at art college in the time of the triumphs which praised joy, or at least the spontaneity of the New Wild Men liberated of all theory. Their rebellion in turn restored tradition to favour, and there was nothing strange about this, considering the fact that in our age’s likes and dislikes, apparently free from any kind of rules, suddenly a sort of regularity resurfaced. The regularity of rejection of the art and tastes of our parents, in favour of a restoration of the art of our grandfathers, and of a rapture over the art of our greatgrandfathers.
But this rebellion was of a special kind, since probably for the first time in history it did not reject and repudiate the achievements of the previous group. The AvantGarde’s great, or perhaps greatest, achievement had been the breaking down of all the barriers, the abolition of all the taboos limiting the freedom of art and the artist in his choice of objectives and of the means to achieve them.
But freedom is a dangerous condition. If perceived in a perverse way it may lead to an absence of all discipline, to the negation of order in ideas and the forms used to express them. It may lead to the negation of the most profound essence of art, that is the harmony which is put into the chaos of inner and external experience.
Many roads lead to the achievement of this. The artist may set up his own order, or he may reach for an already existing one. He may discover in the past artists of a similar mind, sensibility, and attitude to reality, and may thus regard himself as the legitimate inheritor of their general philosophy of art.
Aleksander Żywiecki has grown out of the purely European stream of the art of light: that art which treats light as an autonomous artistic material, marked out by the milestones of the mediaeval stainedglass windows, the Baroque chiaroscuro, the Proto-Impressionists like Turner, followed by the Impressionists and Postimpressionists and their descendants. It is this art which perhaps has exerted the most profound influence on the development of Polish art. It is no coincidence that of the three major trends in the art of the interwar period ( 1918-39), that is Cubism and its derivatives, Surrealism, and Postimpressionism, Poland selected and acknowledged the lastmentioned. It was the Postimpressionism of Józef Pankiewicz and his protégés from the Paris Committee (the KP or kapiści) that won by a landslide in the exhibition salons of prewar Poland, achieving universal and wellnigh impassioned acclaim. It was no coincidence, then, that representatives of Postimpressionism had been appointed to virtually all the chairs of painting in the Polish art schools and colleges already by the postwar years. Postimpressionism became wellnigh the national art form, apparently the closest to our tastes and temperament and our ideals of beauty in the pictorial arts. It was also this trend, with its sophisticated “play of colours on surfaces” that determined the nature of all of our painting. Even when the artists were deliberately rejecting it, it was still mitigating all the brutalities of the respective orientations in the arts reaching us systematically. It achieved this all the more easily since, as we often tend to forget, it was the first trend in Poland not integrally bound to literature, a way of looking at and feeling the world rather than a form defined within specific constraints.
It was to this trend’s recommendations and symptomatic sensibility that Aleksander Żywiecki alluded in his early works. Though, as befits a young artist, he chose the extreme, already subjectless version of an active, spontaneous and excitable, colourful expressionism only remotely connected with visual reality as his model of Postimpressionism. Thereby he learned to think and express himself in terms of the purely visual means of expression: those that make up the deepest essence of art colour and its synonym, light.
But he soon noticed that abstraction can only render the most general impressions and feelings, and that wasn’t enough for him. Abstract art started to be boring and palled on him. Maybe he had succumbed to the dilemmas of our own fin-de-siecle , maybe he had ceased to believe that what is new can be better and more beautiful than what is old?
And that is when he saw that his true forefathers were the Polish painters of the turn of the century, the Młoda Polska boheme who “say they’re decadent, O, Lor”, I’d rather call “em sons o’ soandso”, as the satirical poet Tadeusz Boy Żeleński mocked in one of his rhyming couplets for the Zielony Balonik Cabaret.
And a strange time it was, extraordinarily rich in shades of meaning. Debunking, in revolt against the philistines, and nonchalant, hiding a depth and subtleness of emotion under its mantle of nonchalance. And especially with its sense of finality: a bitter and moving experience of transience and fading away into an irretrievable past of what is probably the most precious in life and the world beauty and the romantic purity of feelings. Or perhaps the other way round: of feelings and intentions, for its is sensibility that defines objectives; it is sensibility that determines one’s worldattitude, philosophy of life, and personal decisions. For artists sensibility determines their choice of motif and the manner in which it is resolved.
At that point in time, at the turn of our century, nearly 90% of the newcomers to this discipline decided on landscape as their main specialisation. Such a massive influx to a genre of painting scorned when Jan Matejko was Principal aroused the stupefaction and even anxiety of the Senate of the illustrious Academy. They were worried a “disturbance of the proportions” in subjectmatter might occur. Moreover a crisis of patriotism or even of a humanist interest in mankind and its fate was detected in this mass access into landscape, whereas basically what the young artists discovered in landscape was what they wanted to see in it unblemished beauty and the opportunity for a fuller selfexpression. For the real landscape, painted out of a heartfelt need, is perhaps the most sincere form of the artist’s selfportrait, free of all postures or even affectation. Naturally it is an inner portrait, which reflects his entire personality and all of his dreams and ideals.
The similarity between the art of Aleksander Żywiecki and his predecessors’ art is neither random nor superficial. Both he and they use the same language of expression; the language of beauty and quietness. It is no coincidence that like Fałat and Stanisławski and their disciples, Żywiecki paints unpeopled landscapes, unspoiled by the once fashionable or even indispensable prop or vestige of human activity, save the picturesque wheatsheaf with a wheaten rope round its waist, or the cartruts along a road. He himself has written about his Polish landscapes that “Every scrap of this land is charming in its simplicity, the power and beauty of its fields smelling of hay and freshly reaped corn; it is in the orchards rich with green and full of sun, in the beflowered meadows, in the rough and dusty country roads, in the solitary oaks along them, in the nighon cobaltblue skies and the heavy clouds that tumble along, or the breezy cloudlets that flit past. All of this, bound by the silver riband of the winding Vistula, gives the unique landscape, not to be found elsewhere, so very homely and dear to us Poles. I hope you will be able to find snippets of this beauty in my paintings…”
Might not these words have come from the pen of one of the Młoda Polska artists? But of course! They are a manifesto no different to the Parnassian motto of art for art’s sake and beauty for beauty’s sake, which made such a deep mark on Polish NeoRomanticism.
Żywiecki’s landscapes are thus above all tranquil and beautiful for their tranquillity and for the peace of their optimism. They are also Polish in two aspects of the term: Polish since they show the Polish lowland landscape, so very different from the mountain landscape that dominated the art of the past and previous centuries and taught in the academies throughout Europe. Secondly, it is a wet landscape, as there are two intrinsic landscape types, albeit sometimes not distinguished even by the theoreticians; the dry and sunny landscape of the South, and the one presented by the masters of die polnische Landschaft, a countryside dear to our tastes of moist halftones and delicate play of colours. Just like the paintings by the die polnische Landschaft masters, Żywiecki’s landscapes are full of sunlight, or even seem to have been painted in light, but at the same time they have no directly falling rays from a sun positioned at the zenith, and hence no sharp shadows. Abrupt chiaroscuro carries an expressiveness close to drama and the conflict of antagonistic forces, while Żywiecki avoids all conflict or even the potential of conflict, preferring the lyrical idyll. His landscapes are deliberately idyllic, for as the poet says, “we Slavs love the idyll” (Adam Mickiewicz), and will, it seems, continue to love it.
What is important in landscape is the choice of the point of observation and the perspective it determines, from which the artist looks at, or even assesses the world. It is in this choice that his relation to reality becomes apparent. Żywiecki employs various vantagepoints and plans. He is equally fascinated by a landscape seen from above, from the majestic bird’s eye view; as he is by the lowlying, frog’s perspective, or the objective or objectifying “direct” or human viewpoint. He is equally capable of perceiving the beauty of distant visions and of close range, apparently trivial detail. For him there is no such thing as greater or lesser importance; he paints the cloud covered or the clear sky as painstakingly as he does a blade of grass. His is an abstract form almost as metaphysical in character and meaning as the tangibly concrete.
Thus in his painting there is no longer an obligatory hierarchy of values. Everything is important, or perhaps equally important. For the full entity is made up of its component parts. This includes all that is precious, or perhaps even most precious to Man, that is Nature, the Nature we are destroying so assiduously. Perhaps it is for this reason that Żywiecki’s landscapes have no people; maybe he did not wish to show the victim and torturer together? Maybe.
Żywiecki’s art is usually classified as realist. Yes, a possible attribution, but only for a none too sensitive eye or an insufficient knowledge of art. In reality the subject of his paintings retains its subjectivity: a tree is a tree, and a blade of corn a blade of corn; while a landscape has the depth proper to it and a perspective constructed in a variety of manners, from the linear to the colour and light perspective, since Żywiecki is an exceptionally proficient painter. But his principal and predominant means of pictorial communication is colour, which Żywiecki applies in a highly free manner. He often departs from local colour to a uniform scheme and to monochrome, while each of his colour schemes holds different emotions and creates a different atmosphere. Or perhaps a different hue of the same lyrics we find so dear.
Żywiecki understands landscape and is attuned to its voice, as I once wrote, and above all he sees the unlimited scope of the emotional potential that it carries. Hence the great variety of his only apparently related motifs; hence the differences in illumination, from the warm noontime sun to the cool monochrome of a dismal day. A genuine rapture over a Nature free of humans and still unspoiled by civilisation emanates from his paintings. In the variety and abundance of such a Nature he rediscovers himself. And in this he is not alone.
According to the dry definition tradition is the transfer from generation to generation of customs, beliefs and convictions, principles, ways of seeing and feeling or behaving, and of the artistic skills. It is the continuation not only of the experience contained in knowledge and skills, but also of the world attitude lying at their foundation and thus of a certain hierarchy of values too, in the conviction that these things are good, because they have been tried and tested by many generations.
Tradition has played an enormous role in history; and in art its contribution has often been decisive. It is no coincidence that the truly great cultures developed over many centuries or even millennia on the groundwork of a firm tradition to mention only China, which has been doing this for 6,000 years, or ancient Egypt, the peacefully evolving art of which was rocked by only one shortlived revolution in the course of well over 3,000 years. Only we in our arrogance have taken rebellion as the conditio sine qua non of true development in the arts; nowhere else except on the small area of Europe has every novelty been welcomed with applause incommensurate with its worth, only to be dismissed after some time in disgrace and relegated to the stockpile of havebeens, ideas and things no longer current or in vogue, and hence ugly and deserving contempt and oblivion.
A variety of revolutions in art has rolled over our unquiet continent. The painter and theoretician Giogrio Vasari called everything that was created in the thousand years separating the fall of the Roman Empire in the West from the outbreak of the great Renaissance an arte Gothico barbaro, thereby attributing the discovery of the purely French style lying at the origins of ‘Gothic’ to the Germanic peoples. Exactly the same befell the Renaissance, which was challenged by Mannerism and Baroque, until they too, in their turn, came to be degraded and mocked by Neoclassicism.
The wheel of art and the ideas connected with it was revolving faster and faster, until in our century it reached its apogee of revolutions. Burn down the Louvre!’ cried the Italian and French Futurists, while the Russian Constructivists reechoed their remonstrances with their own slogan of “one machine nut and bolt is of more value to us than all the collections in the Kremlin.”
Contempt for tradition has become the watchword of modern artists it just wasn’t done to be anything else but “modern.” The words “tradition”, “traditionalism”, and “traditionalist” changed their sense, and now mean “fuddyduddyl”, “a person of limited scope and incapable of creative thought and work.” Simply a sluggard, oaf, or hack pandering to the tastes of the petite bourgeoisie which, as is wellknown, “lives awfully in awful apartments” with country views on their dingy walls. With all those landscapes and nudes which show an admiration for the world and its natural beauty. In other words the banal and the cliché, for art has other, far more serious tasks to accomplish.
Thus beauty was cursed out of the vocabulary of art as a relic of the past, no longer serviceable in the new objectives. It became the artist’s aspiration rather to build new worlds and to arraign existing reality than to express approbation for it. Art shook off its roots and set out on a grand adventure.
But it was severely disappointed. Yet, it accomplished many exciting discoveries and experienced the taste of novelty, down to the bitterness of selfannihilation, only once again to appreciate the role of tradition. In this it is reminiscent of the young man in the story who says that when he was 16 he thought his father was a fool, but now at the age of 25 he is so surprised how the old fellow has grown wiser over just a couple of years.
Aleksander Żywiecki belongs to a generation already free of the pressure of the AvantGarde and its issues. He was born in 1962, when the crisis in AvantGarde ideas and art was already apparent. He grew up in the times when the famous critic Paul Restany had exclaimed, “L ‘art est mort!” and had withdrawn into the forests of South America, from where he announced his Rio Negro Manifesto, like Rousseau appealing for a return to nature and to the origins of art. He was at art college in the time of the triumphs which praised joy, or at least the spontaneity of the New Wild Men liberated of all theory. Their rebellion in turn restored tradition to favour, and there was nothing strange about this, considering the fact that in our age’s likes and dislikes, apparently free from any kind of rules, suddenly a sort of regularity resurfaced. The regularity of rejection of the art and tastes of our parents, in favour of a restoration of the art of our grandfathers, and of a rapture over the art of our greatgrandfathers.
But this rebellion was of a special kind, since probably for the first time in history it did not reject and repudiate the achievements of the previous group. The AvantGarde’s great, or perhaps greatest, achievement had been the breaking down of all the barriers, the abolition of all the taboos limiting the freedom of art and the artist in his choice of objectives and of the means to achieve them.
But freedom is a dangerous condition. If perceived in a perverse way it may lead to an absence of all discipline, to the negation of order in ideas and the forms used to express them. It may lead to the negation of the most profound essence of art, that is the harmony which is put into the chaos of inner and external experience.
Many roads lead to the achievement of this. The artist may set up his own order, or he may reach for an already existing one. He may discover in the past artists of a similar mind, sensibility, and attitude to reality, and may thus regard himself as the legitimate inheritor of their general philosophy of art.
Aleksander Żywiecki has grown out of the purely European stream of the art of light: that art which treats light as an autonomous artistic material, marked out by the milestones of the mediaeval stainedglass windows, the Baroque chiaroscuro, the Proto-Impressionists like Turner, followed by the Impressionists and Postimpressionists and their descendants. It is this art which perhaps has exerted the most profound influence on the development of Polish art. It is no coincidence that of the three major trends in the art of the interwar period ( 1918-39), that is Cubism and its derivatives, Surrealism, and Postimpressionism, Poland selected and acknowledged the lastmentioned. It was the Postimpressionism of Józef Pankiewicz and his protégés from the Paris Committee (the KP or kapiści) that won by a landslide in the exhibition salons of prewar Poland, achieving universal and wellnigh impassioned acclaim. It was no coincidence, then, that representatives of Postimpressionism had been appointed to virtually all the chairs of painting in the Polish art schools and colleges already by the postwar years. Postimpressionism became wellnigh the national art form, apparently the closest to our tastes and temperament and our ideals of beauty in the pictorial arts. It was also this trend, with its sophisticated “play of colours on surfaces” that determined the nature of all of our painting. Even when the artists were deliberately rejecting it, it was still mitigating all the brutalities of the respective orientations in the arts reaching us systematically. It achieved this all the more easily since, as we often tend to forget, it was the first trend in Poland not integrally bound to literature, a way of looking at and feeling the world rather than a form defined within specific constraints.
It was to this trend’s recommendations and symptomatic sensibility that Aleksander Żywiecki alluded in his early works. Though, as befits a young artist, he chose the extreme, already subjectless version of an active, spontaneous and excitable, colourful expressionism only remotely connected with visual reality as his model of Postimpressionism. Thereby he learned to think and express himself in terms of the purely visual means of expression: those that make up the deepest essence of art colour and its synonym, light.
But he soon noticed that abstraction can only render the most general impressions and feelings, and that wasn’t enough for him. Abstract art started to be boring and palled on him. Maybe he had succumbed to the dilemmas of our own fin-de-siecle , maybe he had ceased to believe that what is new can be better and more beautiful than what is old?
And that is when he saw that his true forefathers were the Polish painters of the turn of the century, the Młoda Polska boheme who “say they’re decadent, O, Lor”, I’d rather call “em sons o’ soandso”, as the satirical poet Tadeusz Boy Żeleński mocked in one of his rhyming couplets for the Zielony Balonik Cabaret.
And a strange time it was, extraordinarily rich in shades of meaning. Debunking, in revolt against the philistines, and nonchalant, hiding a depth and subtleness of emotion under its mantle of nonchalance. And especially with its sense of finality: a bitter and moving experience of transience and fading away into an irretrievable past of what is probably the most precious in life and the world beauty and the romantic purity of feelings. Or perhaps the other way round: of feelings and intentions, for its is sensibility that defines objectives; it is sensibility that determines one’s worldattitude, philosophy of life, and personal decisions. For artists sensibility determines their choice of motif and the manner in which it is resolved.
At that point in time, at the turn of our century, nearly 90% of the newcomers to this discipline decided on landscape as their main specialisation. Such a massive influx to a genre of painting scorned when Jan Matejko was Principal aroused the stupefaction and even anxiety of the Senate of the illustrious Academy. They were worried a “disturbance of the proportions” in subjectmatter might occur. Moreover a crisis of patriotism or even of a humanist interest in mankind and its fate was detected in this mass access into landscape, whereas basically what the young artists discovered in landscape was what they wanted to see in it unblemished beauty and the opportunity for a fuller selfexpression. For the real landscape, painted out of a heartfelt need, is perhaps the most sincere form of the artist’s selfportrait, free of all postures or even affectation. Naturally it is an inner portrait, which reflects his entire personality and all of his dreams and ideals.
The similarity between the art of Aleksander Żywiecki and his predecessors’ art is neither random nor superficial. Both he and they use the same language of expression; the language of beauty and quietness. It is no coincidence that like Fałat and Stanisławski and their disciples, Żywiecki paints unpeopled landscapes, unspoiled by the once fashionable or even indispensable prop or vestige of human activity, save the picturesque wheatsheaf with a wheaten rope round its waist, or the cartruts along a road. He himself has written about his Polish landscapes that “Every scrap of this land is charming in its simplicity, the power and beauty of its fields smelling of hay and freshly reaped corn; it is in the orchards rich with green and full of sun, in the beflowered meadows, in the rough and dusty country roads, in the solitary oaks along them, in the nighon cobaltblue skies and the heavy clouds that tumble along, or the breezy cloudlets that flit past. All of this, bound by the silver riband of the winding Vistula, gives the unique landscape, not to be found elsewhere, so very homely and dear to us Poles. I hope you will be able to find snippets of this beauty in my paintings…”
Might not these words have come from the pen of one of the Młoda Polska artists? But of course! They are a manifesto no different to the Parnassian motto of art for art’s sake and beauty for beauty’s sake, which made such a deep mark on Polish NeoRomanticism.
Żywiecki’s landscapes are thus above all tranquil and beautiful for their tranquillity and for the peace of their optimism. They are also Polish in two aspects of the term: Polish since they show the Polish lowland landscape, so very different from the mountain landscape that dominated the art of the past and previous centuries and taught in the academies throughout Europe. Secondly, it is a wet landscape, as there are two intrinsic landscape types, albeit sometimes not distinguished even by the theoreticians; the dry and sunny landscape of the South, and the one presented by the masters of die polnische Landschaft, a countryside dear to our tastes of moist halftones and delicate play of colours. Just like the paintings by the die polnische Landschaft masters, Żywiecki’s landscapes are full of sunlight, or even seem to have been painted in light, but at the same time they have no directly falling rays from a sun positioned at the zenith, and hence no sharp shadows. Abrupt chiaroscuro carries an expressiveness close to drama and the conflict of antagonistic forces, while Żywiecki avoids all conflict or even the potential of conflict, preferring the lyrical idyll. His landscapes are deliberately idyllic, for as the poet says, “we Slavs love the idyll” (Adam Mickiewicz), and will, it seems, continue to love it.
What is important in landscape is the choice of the point of observation and the perspective it determines, from which the artist looks at, or even assesses the world. It is in this choice that his relation to reality becomes apparent. Żywiecki employs various vantagepoints and plans. He is equally fascinated by a landscape seen from above, from the majestic bird’s eye view; as he is by the lowlying, frog’s perspective, or the objective or objectifying “direct” or human viewpoint. He is equally capable of perceiving the beauty of distant visions and of close range, apparently trivial detail. For him there is no such thing as greater or lesser importance; he paints the cloud covered or the clear sky as painstakingly as he does a blade of grass. His is an abstract form almost as metaphysical in character and meaning as the tangibly concrete.
Thus in his painting there is no longer an obligatory hierarchy of values. Everything is important, or perhaps equally important. For the full entity is made up of its component parts. This includes all that is precious, or perhaps even most precious to Man, that is Nature, the Nature we are destroying so assiduously. Perhaps it is for this reason that Żywiecki’s landscapes have no people; maybe he did not wish to show the victim and torturer together? Maybe.
Żywiecki’s art is usually classified as realist. Yes, a possible attribution, but only for a none too sensitive eye or an insufficient knowledge of art. In reality the subject of his paintings retains its subjectivity: a tree is a tree, and a blade of corn a blade of corn; while a landscape has the depth proper to it and a perspective constructed in a variety of manners, from the linear to the colour and light perspective, since Żywiecki is an exceptionally proficient painter. But his principal and predominant means of pictorial communication is colour, which Żywiecki applies in a highly free manner. He often departs from local colour to a uniform scheme and to monochrome, while each of his colour schemes holds different emotions and creates a different atmosphere. Or perhaps a different hue of the same lyrics we find so dear.
Żywiecki understands landscape and is attuned to its voice, as I once wrote, and above all he sees the unlimited scope of the emotional potential that it carries. Hence the great variety of his only apparently related motifs; hence the differences in illumination, from the warm noontime sun to the cool monochrome of a dismal day. A genuine rapture over a Nature free of humans and still unspoiled by civilisation emanates from his paintings. In the variety and abundance of such a Nature he rediscovers himself. And in this he is not alone.