Salvador Dali and his nymphomaniac wife .

According to a short editorial in New Scientist (2 February 2013) Salvador Dali had a very unorthodox albeit very simple method of mental refreshment.

He would sit with a key in one hand, poised above a metal plate placed on the floor, and let sleep take him. As soon as he began to slumber in earnest, the key would slip from his fingers and clang against the plate - waking him immediately.

Dali declared that this method provided all the rest he needed before getting on with a new painting . It seems to me that he probably was in the stage 2 of his sleep. Because this is the perfect stage for naps. Lasting 20 minutes or so, it restores fatigued muscles and replenishes alertness. Confirm the science of sleep if you are awakened during this stage, you will feel refreshed and happy. But it is very impossible that you will have dreams during this stage. The majority of dreams happens after the stage 4 of deep sleep in REM stage. I often put down my dreams on paper, in writing or drawings. I memorise and repeat them time after time to prevent them escaping from my unconscious memory before they are printed in my conscious memory. Of course I only bother with the most unusual, impossible, shocking or surreal dreams. The content of Dali's paintings has probably nothing to do with his dreams, in contradiction to the widely repeated truisms:

'What inspired Salvador Dali? - his dreams and his wife'.

The first answer is a nonsensical one, the second is a true one. His wife Gala was not only a huge inspiration for his paintings but also a gigantic, dominating force behind his productions, his popularity and his ultimate fate as a fallen genius. Think about it: Dali was a master painter, with his absolutely amazing, conscientious techniques; with his vulnerability behind his moustache; with his genuine spirituality; with his homosexual inclinations; without his wife, without Gala!

I can imagine all the great paintings he would have made were it not for the devil woman - His wife. Maybe he would have only been discovered posthumously  but for the greatness of his art, and art in general, who cares about that? Dali as a brilliant genius and as a serious artist existed between 1929 and 1939. Full stop. After that period Dali's commercial success, huge as it was, coincided with his decline as a serious artist. Full stop!

Here are some of his best paintings. I didn't include his best painting 'The Persistence of Memory' from 1931 only because I couldn't find a good image of it on WWW. I do have a few books included this painting but they are too big for my scanner.

Sorry for that. You can find a good image of this painting at Wikpedia.

Another excellent work is the Morphological Echo - consisting of two oil on panel paintings made between 1934 and 1936. Hereby the two images:

Lugubrious Game - 1929

 

Salvador Dali on "What's My Line?", his books and "Un Chien Andalou"

Once upon a time there were a group of people whose dream was to set other people free. The dream, the unreal, the subconscious were the instruments for this. As Andre Breton explained in his first Manifesto:

The mere word freedom is the only one that still excites me. I deem it capable of indefinitely sustaining the old human fanaticism.It doubtless satisfies my only legitimate aspiration. Among all the many misfortunes to which we are heir, it is only fair to admit that we are allowed the greatest degree of freedom of thought. It is up to us not to misuse it. To reduce the imagination to a state of slavery — even though it would mean the elimination of what is commonly called happiness — is to betray all sense of absolute justice within oneself.

(Translation by R.Swaver and H.R. Lane) 

Probably one of the first visual manifestos of Surrealism was the short movie 'Un Chien Andalou' directed by Luis Buñuel and written by him and Salvador Dali.



Through their accomplishment with Un Chien Andalou, Dalí and Buñuel became the first filmmakers to be officially welcomed into the ranks of the Surrealists by the movement's leader André Breton.

I mentioned once that Breton was a kind of dictator of Surrealism. He was like a pope, he cursed and excommunicated. He was immune to most of the sins, except for pride and lust. In contrast to the other surreal artists he had no sense of humour, he was a deadly serious man.

 Dali, for almost 40 years, has been the most famous painters alive. Not only as a surreal painter but as a visual artist in general. I have a kind of weird relationship with Dali's art. I love his techniques. He is a genius painter, old master quality. He created the most amazing and shocking paintings. I love his art made between 1929 till 1939. After that he become a slave of his wife Gala, and a caricature of himself. He become a brand with his bodily trademark, the moustache (not really original, adopted from portrait of Philip IV by Velásquez.)

Here in the short video you can watch Dali live, still in good shape, on American TV in a 'What's My Line' show from 1952.

'What's My Line' was a panel show in which 4 celebrities had to work out the occupations of a series of invited guests. This show originally ran in the United States on the CBS Television Network from 1950 to 1967. Here is one of the early shows with Salvador Dali as a guest.


 


If you are a collector or interested in books about, illustrated by or featuring the art of Dali, here is a link to an blog about all of those things : http://dalibookcollector.blogspot.co.uk/p/books-illustrated-by-dali.html

Catch me if you can!

Catch me if you can - acrylics on canvas by Kasia B.Turajczyk

Once upon a time there was a forest, and some trees, and a bridge, and water, and a reflection in that water, i.e. an optical illusion.

A mysterious light, a surreal ambience, slightly unrealistic, a bit “horrorific” (sic!).

Then the eye was created. An All-Seeing and All-Knowing Eye. A Protecting Eye, a Reasoning Eye – but also a rebuking, twisted and unpredictable eye.

Then on the other side a planet was born. But is that a living planet? It is an unknowable fact. It is a big mystery. This planet is motionless. The far side is always dark and inaccessible.

Then in the end THEY came. What do they want? I will not be the one to betray their secret. If you want to know, go and talk to them, q.v.

They are still there, I checked again recently. They even tried to communicate with me. Unfortunately my currently very muddy brain couldn’t understand them. I blame the depression, the rain and fog.

I am not sure if you will be able to see them, it seems to me that they like to play ‘hide and seek’. They are not afraid of me, perhaps because I made them. Nonetheless they don’t want me to take liberties with them. I think they are right, by the way. I could asphyxiate them with my nihilism.

P.S. When you arrive at the car park of Lawrence Castle in the Haldon Forest Park do not follow the path of your scarcely sufficient imagination. Instead close your eyes and start using quantum entanglement to traverse the distance between you and them. Find the bridge and wait until the deepest mystery of THEIR being is revealed. Of course this will only be possible if you are honest, brave and beautiful (inside).

The adventure with an Ocean Monster and a Blueberry Angel.

My third painting from the Blueberry-land Series.

Blueberryer and Blueberryess have found themselves in a tangled situation again.

Against all advice, Blueberryess jumped into the ocean because she wanted to know what she could find deep down in the black water. After that Blueberryer as a true gentlemen had no other option than to take a deep breath and jump into the ocean too. He did take the jump on his bike though. Of course he had a choice. To forget his Blueberryess and go for a wonderful bike ride in the “magnifique” Blueberry valley, sipping slowly the elegant Blueberry Cocktail at the top of the Blueberry Hill and enjoying the marvellous view over Blueberry Land. But as a victim of his own conception of his greatness, he had no other option than to jump into the black waters of that ocean. Or maybe it was true love?

This time only a miracle could help them. Blueberryess was swept swiftly into the Ocean Monster’s maw, and Bluberryer following her on his bike did almost the same. Suddenly out of the nothingness a Blueberry Angel appeared close to the monster. Would he be able to rescue the two reckless Blueberries?

Michael Sowa and his pigs.

Pork Soup by Michael Sowa 

One of my favourite imaginary, kind of surreal films is  Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s  Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain. Widely knows as  Amélie. Above Amélie bed in her bedroom are hanging pictures/ prints of Michael Sowa. One of the pictures is "Fowl with Pearls" and another is 'Filmhoud".  Michael Sowa is a German surrealist illustrator and painters. He belongs to the most noted  illustrators in Germany. A wider public got aware of him through his illustrations for Axel Hacke’s publications. He used a pseudonym Heinz Obein.

In 1995 Michael Sowa was awarded with the Olaf-Gulbransson-Preis, in 2004 he received the Berlin Bookprice in the category Children’s Books for ‘Prinz Tamino’. Besides many book projects he works for newspapers such as Die Zeit and The New Yorker.

His work has been exhibited in the Wilhelm-Busch-Museum Hannover, in the Kunsthalle Oldenburg, at The Liebenweintrum in Burghausen and repetedly in Japan. In 2009 his 130 works were show in Japan, in Tokyo,   Kyoto and Yokohama.

His works/ imagination has something similar with René  Magritte's work. There is one fundamental difference between them, Sowa is a better painter (qua technique) than Magritte.  Magritte was more illustrator than painter. His paintings are really badly made from the point of view of an perfectionist- painter par excellent like me.

I have been trying to find some more personal/ biographical information about Michael Sowa but couldn't really find a lot about him. He was born in 1945 in Berlin, finished Art Pedagogic College. His name is a Polish one. Sowa means Owl in Polish.

There is a book available on Amazon entitled Sowa's Ark, with a collection of  over fifty farm animal-centric images.

A miniature pig splashes around in a bowl of soup; a duck leads a wheelbarrow down a lane; a woman gently strokes her daughter's face with a live rabbit in a dimly lit room. This work provides a journey into the imagination of artist Michael Sowa where a menagerie of bizarre animals take on complex personae. Using rich textures and inventive techniques of paint and varnish, these pictures achieve the otherworldly look of a surrealist fairy tale. -  From Amazon description 

His work is full of eccentric, humours, bizarre, fabulous stories most of them about animals. I love paintings which tell stories. His technique is 'magnifique'.

Here is the cover of his book from Amazon.



 I just order Sowa's Ark. Soon I will post more about him.

Below are some images of his paintings, which I really like.

School of Fish 

The Bear by Michael Sowa

Flying Pig by Michael Sowa

Blueberry Fantasy by Kasia B. Turajczyk

Maybe I should not post to this blog my own work, and I should not write about it either.
But in this case I can’t resist it. I think this painting has something fantastic, something enigmatic and mysterious.
After a few years spent reading and watching and doing research about fantastic and fantasy art and all the genres in between I am coming more and more to understand and recognise all the boundaries and confusions between and about fantasy art and the fantastic elements in art. In his famous book "Au coeur du fantastique" Roger Caillos said that fantasy is secret and mysterious . I am not sure he was right about that. There are lots of paintings in the fantasy art genre which are full of fantastic elements and full of weird and crazy imaginary creatures with absolutely no mysterious or secret ambience what so ever. It could be just the problem of the onomastics or the semantic. I don’t know since I can’t ask Caillos any more precisely what he meant when he used mystery and secret as synonyms for fantasy.
Back to my painting “The Blueberry Fantasy”; which I categorised as a mysterious painting and I am not only the one. All the people who have seen it found The Blueberry Fantasy a very surrealistic and secret work. Every time someone looks at it they find new mysterious creatures, shapes and shadows. And people love it. As proud as I am (read it as sarcasm) I present my mysterious paintings amongst all the other great works by famous painters.
Voila!

Blueberry Fantasy - acrylics on canvas, 90cmx90cm

Jacek Yerka and Toruń

I wrote this text a year ago and had forgotten to post it. Postpone today!

A few weeks ago I visited Toruń, a very old and historic city in Poland. The city is famous for having preserved almost intact its medieval spatial layout and many Gothic buildings, all built from brick, including monumental churches, the Town Hall and many burgher houses. I went there to see an exhibition of my ex-mother in law, a famous Polish film Movie star, the late Helena Grossówna. When lying in bed at the hotel during the night, I was thinking about all the famous people who were born and worked in this city. Nicolaus Copernicus was born in Toruń on 19 February 1473. At that time Toruń was part of Royal Prussia, a region of the Kingdom of Poland. Helenka Grossówna was born in Toruń too, in 1904. In her time Toruń wasn’t Polish anymore, the city was part of the German Empire. After the Second World War Toruń returned to Poland. I started to think about famous painters born in Toruń. At first I couldn’t remember any, and then suddenly Eureka! Jacek Yerka of course. He was born and studied in Toruń and he is one of the most famous fantastic artists of his time all over the world. The perfect subject for my surreal-fantasy art blog.
Jacek Yerka was born in Torun in 1952 studied art at the University in Toruń. It was a time (and probably still is) when technique was less important, and no one studied the old Masters. But Yerka did, he learnt directly from the masters of Northern Europe - the Van Eycks, Dierck Bouts, Robert Campin, Bosch, and surrealists such as Magritte.
Yerka said:

I did the first painting in my life a year before going to college, where I began studying graphics. My instructors always tried to get me to paint in the more contemporary abstract style, and move away from my fascination with realism. I saw this as an attempt to stifle my own creative style and steadfastly refused to fall in line. Eventually, my teachers relented.

His paintings are acrylic on canvas, pastels and drawings on paper.
His works are neo-surreal, fairy tale like, fantastic and sometimes more Sci-Fi than fantastic. The colours are now and then very brutal and powerful and occasionally very delicate, but nevertheless very expressive. The details are amazingly excellent. You really sense the hand of a Master, (F.E.: Between Heaven and Hell, The Way). As a painter I can tell you how time consuming it is to make these kinds of paintings.

I don’t like every work of his, but I definitely respect his imagination and his technique. I even think of buying one of his paintings of his grandmother’s kitchen. I hope he will make a few new paintings with this motif. Especially I like “Between Heaven and Hell”, "Cupboard Sunset", "Indian Summer", "the Strawberry Grove" and the "Illegal Production of Light".
Yerka's work has been exhibited in Poland, Germany, Monaco, France, and the United States. His works are also to be seen in Polish art museums. Yerka's work can also be seen in Mind Fields, a book in which Harlan Ellison has provided narration for each of Yerka's selected pieces.
In 1995 the artist was awarded the prestigious World Fantasy Award for the best artist.

On his website you can read more about Jacek Yerka, by Jacek Yerka.
http://www.yerkaland.com/bio_en.php
By the way the website is an excellent one, congratulations!

Below are a few images of my favourite paintings by Jacek Yerka.

The Strawberry Grove

The cupboard sunset

The winter wave

The road

Playing with Magritte in the spirit of Breughel

Life can be very surrealistic from time to time, in fact more often than you might expect. But surrealistic and at the same time optimistic doesn’t happen very often. But it happened to me on Sunday (May 30th 2009) in Brussels.
Reneé Magritte’s universe was conjured up on the Place Royal… giant creatures and live installations from Magritte’s paintings, a ballerina dancing on top of a piano, girls with baskets full of apples, and men with bowler hats all on a beautiful sunny day and with great music. The magical, surreal universe of Reneé Magritte came to life. The Musée Magritte Museum opened that door for us.
My partner and I were among the hundreds of fortunate people in Brussels to visit the new Musée Magritte Museum, before the official opening, and for free! René Magritte is without doubt one of the most important Belgian artists and one of the most influential ‘mass culture’ surrealist painters. He was possibly more of a thinker and illustrator than a painter. As a surrealist and a socialist he hoped to change the world and the mentality of the crowd, but he didn’t. Instead he became the most popular artist of the XX century. At the end of his life he also became very wealthy; he painted what the buyers wanted. What I personally like in his work is not his technique (Dali was absolutely a better painter), not the paintings by themselves, but the irony behind his surrealism. I love Magritte’s imagination and his jokes with his viewers - “Hey folks - I am taking you in!”. In some sense he had the same credo the I have; I believe that we are here on this planet by accident and not for long, actually and that our existence is meaningless, and that we shouldn’t take ourselves so damn seriously – it seems to me that Magritte thought about his own universe in much the same way. In fact I discovered at the weekend that during the second world war Magritte went so far as to paint works in the style of Picasso, Braque, Max Ernst and others. Some of these "forgeries" were subsequently sold in an auction at the Palace of Fine Arts in Brussels. He also forged money and he spent it successfully. (I like this man).

The great Surrealist René Magritte once said:

My painting is visible images which conceal nothing…. they evoke mystery and indeed when one sees one of my pictures, one asks oneself this simple question 'What does that mean'? It does not mean anything, because mystery means nothing either, it is unknowable.

Inspirited by Magritte, my partner Jim and one of my favourite painters, Peter Breughel the Elder, here is a new work of mine

“Playing with Magritte in the spirit of Breughel”.

This work is available for sale as a quality print and/or poster on RedBubble

View words about the new Musée Magritte Museum. The multidisciplinary collection contains more than 200 works consisting in oils on canvas, gouaches, drawings, sculptures and painted objects but also in advertising posters, music scores and vintage. Official opening of the museum was yesterday, June, 2nd 2009. The museum is situated close to the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, on Place Royale 1.

Fantastic art & fantasy art & surreal?

Not doubt I am an alien from the end of a rainbow.

A new dream

(My new digital painting - mixed media: traditional oil painting, photography, photo shop)


I would like to spend my life gazing at the stars up in the sky wondering about ………..it is a surreal painting, fantasy art, fantastic art, imaginary art.........

Arcimboldo - an eccentric artis

I am busy at the moment writing a book about Fantasy Art and its history. While searching online and reading reports and books on this subject, I have discovered that some artists, that for me so obviously (and without any doubt) should belong to the genre of unique fantasy art/fantastic artists haven’t been mention at all; either in books or reports. Extremely peculiar.

One of the artists that I haven’t come across in any of the sources I looked through is Giuseppe Arcimboldo. Maybe the reason that nobody has mentioned him is the fact that his art is very bizarre and very difficult to categorize. People love to pigeonhole everything. If something or somebody is very unique or uncanny or extremely original and difficult to put away in a drawer with other similar things than sometimes we just ignore it or forget it. This is only my speculation.

Back to the artist Giuseppe Arcimboldo. Arcimboldo was born in Milan in 1527 and grew up during the High Renaissance (Mannerism). He was extremely famous during his lifetime. He was a court painter of Emperor Ferdinand I (Habsburg), then Maximilian II and at the end Rudolph II. Part of Arcimboldo's duties included designing gala events for the imperial family. These were flashy affairs with gilded fountains and rivers of champagne, parades and promenades, flocks of coloured birds, music, theatre, tons of original artwork, sculptures, and much pageantry. Arcimboldo invented many unique special effects for these events such as an enormous hydro-mechanically powered musical instrument which acted like a modern colour organ; called the "Harpsichord of Colour." He was a man of many talents, and in the vein of other Renaissance great spirits (like Leonardo da Vinci) he served also as an architect, stage designer, engineer, water engineer and art specialist.

But as soon as he was dead he was totally forgotten. I can only speculate again about the reason, why people lost interest in his art. Perhaps he was misunderstood by the generations that followed? Maybe his sinister paintings weren’t enjoyable, interesting or intriguing? Or maybe they were too bamboozling, too insane for people of past centuries. Some of the contemporary reviews spoke about “the state of a deranged mind”. The interest in his abstruse and fantastic pictures, of which we only have a very few originals nowadays, revived only at the end of the 19th century. The surrealist movement brought him back into the public interest.

Personally I like his bizarre paintings. They are such unique art works, unique concepts, the creations of a very eccentric, intelligent and sophisticated brain. The documents of the time bear witness to the fact that monarchs and his contemporaries in general were also enthusiastic about his art.

His most recognizable paintings are known as the The Four Seasons series. The artistic concept of these pictures from 1563 was unique and laid the foundation of Arcimboldo’s success as a painter. The Four Seasons consist of four paintings - Winter, Spring, Summer and Autumn. All of them depict faces and heads but not normal human heads, vegetable-fruit-flower-tree heads.

Other famous works by him are: Water and Fire (1566), The Lawyer (1566), The Cook (1570) another series of the Four Seasons from 1572, two series of Four Seasons in 1573. He painted The Four Seasons twice again in 1577.

In 1591 he painted two of his most famous pictures, Flora (c.1591) and Vertumnus (1590-1591. Vertumnus is a portrait of Rudolph II, showing him as Vertumnus, the ancient Roman god of vegetation and transformation. The painting Verumnus consists entirely of magnificent fruits, flowers and vegetables. Rudolph II awarded Arcimboldo one of his highest orders in 1592. Next year on 11 July 1593 the painter died.

The Winter 1572 (Private Collection, Bergamo)

Looking at Arcimboldo’s bizarre paintings I can’t escape from thoughts about the human brain and the endless possibilities of the uncontrolled imagination. How did a man born in the time of the Renaissance, in a time when nobody painted such paintings, decide to create monstrous images of human heads?

For example, have a look at the Winter - head from The Four Seasons. The profile of the man is made up from the knobby stump of a tree, with a broken branch for the nose, moss for the stubble on the chin and two parasitic mushrooms for the lips. Is this more or less sinister than the hellish monsters thought up by Hieronymus Bosch? Arcimboldo paints a parody that is at times almost plausible in its suggestions of death and decay in a living being. The Winter portrait, the image of the head can horrify people, but at the same time it is so amazingly beautiful. The balance of the colour-palette is astonishing and tremendous. What a great imagination Arcimboldo had, and what a great colourist he was!

These puzzle-visionary-capriccio images of all the Portraits-Heads-Faces made by Arcimboldo are incredibly unusual, surreal and fantastic. I am curious if there are viewers who won’t see any faces in his paintings, only flowers and vegetables?

Above is a painting from a series based on the Four Seasons; this one is called Summer. The nose of the person appears to be made out of a very ripe cucumber. The chin is from a pear, and the cheek is made from a peach. Look closely at the man's coat. Can you see the name of the artist woven into the collar of his jacket, and the date 1573 embroidered on the shoulder?

Tomasz Setowski-the next exhibition.

Nadejscie wiosny - Tomasz Setowski ( the Arrival of the Spring)

For the 'lovers' of Tomasz Setowski's art, I have some new information.

The next his big exposition is in Dubai, in April. This is a great occasion to visit Dubai, the most hot and hip and sky-scraping place of this moment.

For those under us who are not exceptional rich but still would like to see the work of mr. Setkowski, I have a nice announcement. There is a great possibility in Poland to see his work and during the whole year round. Namely, in Częstochowa mr. Sętowski has own Gallery with his own paintings, of course. I am planning to be there at the end of May. I hope to see you there too.

Here the address, the name of the gallery and the phone/email.

Muzeum Wyobraźni - Galeria autorska Tomasza Sętowskiego
ul.Oławska 2
Częstochowa 42-200

tel: 034 366 66 28
email: muzeum_wyobrazni@O2.pl

Shoji Tanaka and Surreal Art

Do you have any idea, even a fuzzy one, what you get if you mix together the spirit of Hieronymus Bosch's creations and the legacy of the medieval art plus the speck of Chagall's "world of dreams" plus Japanese background? No...........I haven't had any idea too.......till I found Shoji Tanaka.

Shoji Tanaka is a Japanese artist, genre Fantasy Art or maybe he will appreciate the name Fantastic Artist or Surreal Art (but I think he is not sensu stricto).

I have discovered (maybe I am wrong, please correct me if I am) that his paintings are hard to be found in galleries in Europe.

But there is something to see in USA, Main Street, Maroochy, Queensland. Never been there.

This year there is a great, great exhibition of Fantasy Art & Fantastic Art & Surreal Art in Japan, in Kyoto. Most of the Artist will be Japanese's artist. I would love to see it, I have been fascinated since 30 years by Japanese literature – incredible magical and beautiful.

I think it will be amazing to be there, but I am not sure how to accomplish it. The opening is today, the exhibition is open only one week and I still can't walk right after my foot-surgery in February..

Bye, bye Fantasy Art......

Hieronymus Bosch and his Fantasy Art

In all books about art and all the books about fantasy art Hieronymus Bosch is mentioned as the father of surrealist art and the Fantasy Art genre. All those monsters, impossible structures of the machines and the bizarre landscapes he painted in his works, are a great example of Fantasy Art. His style was unique, strikingly free, and his symbolism, unforgettably vivid, remains unparalleled to this day.

Indeed Bosch had a tremendous fantasy or maybe even a tremendous fear of hell. Hieronymus took his work very seriously and absolutely not as an amusement. Marvellous and terrifying, he expressed an intense pessimism and reflected the anxieties of his time, one of great social and political upheaval.

It was his image of hell, his tragic view of human existence, dwelling upon the triumph of sin that forced him to paint all the horror. He was a very religious person and believed in hell, devils, monsters, life after death and all the other things that were ordinary and standard for the inhabitant of Catholic Europe in the XV and early XVI century.

He didn’t want to entertain people, he wanted to frighten them with his bizarre fantasy. I think the man himself must have been very morbid to have been so concerned with pain.

In 1488 he joined the highly respected Brotherhood of Our Lady, an arch-conservative religious group of some 40 influential citizens of 's-Hertogenbosch and some 7000 'outer-members' from all over Europe. Bosch lived at a time when the medieval period was giving way to a new age. His paintings undoubtedly reflect his concern for a changing world. Looked at in this way Bosch and his fantasies are curiously up to date.

Tomasz Setowski

I've just got back from my Christmas holiday in Poland. My partner Jim and I spent the first night in the Marriott in Warsaw. We arrived in the late evening, and while searching for a restaurant in the Marriott to celebrate Jim's birthday I noticed some very unusual paintings on the walls. They were fantasy art paintings, it was incontrovertible. They name of the artist was Tomasz Setowski. I had never heard about him before this particular moment in the Marriott in Warsaw. They were paintings he created between 2000 and 2007. Some of the works have previously been displayed in New York, Dubai, Abu Dhabi and elswhere. He is a very original, extraordinary, unique, surrealist Polish painter and I have never heard about him. Not good!

And he is very famous, actually. The next day in the morning I saw more of his works hanging on the second floor in the Marriott Hotel. He is a great artist, not doubt about this, but I missed something in his paintings. His imagination is so cold, so far-away. With Hieronymus Bosch or Peter Breughel you can feel the fear or the grimness or the grotesque. But here in Sętowski's paintings I couldn't find any emotion. They were very individual fantasy paintings only maybe understood by their creator. But this is only my feeling; Tomasz Sętowski is a great painter of the magical realism school.