About Art & Painting

Art “(…) is a very human way of making your life nicer. The practice of art isn’t to make a living. It’s to make your soul grow.”, Kurt Vonnegut once said. Art allows me to arrange the reality in my own, uncompromised way. For me, art is a kind of answer to my various needs, however it is not the answer itself. It is rather a continuous question and a comment on times we live in. I associate many functions with art: emotional, communicative, sometimes purely esthetic, therapeutical and particularly important for me, cognitive and descriptive. I feel the need of self expression and creation and art fully enables me both.
When I paint, what undoubtedly fascinates me is the color, the matter, the process of creation. Painting is the most familiar way of expression for me, the one through which I can fully and most naturally express myself. Interesting, that painting is a kind of sublimation of motives, loose ideas, faces, landscapes and images you have seen somewhere before. It’s as when I am asked if I know what my mother looks like. Of course I know. What does my dad look like? I can recognize him easily. So can I my sister. But when I am asked to paint them exactly the way I can remember them, I am unable to do that. And when I recall them in my mind, I can see their faces through particular photos, pictures, portraits taken or painted. We have this tendency of remembering through images of great sharpness, with smallest details. Painting also gives such opportunity, an opportunity of both very complex and very individual remembering. Maybe this is the magic of painting that fascinates me so much.

GamES Series / Serigraphy & Acrylics on canvas

“Ewelina Sośniak is a graduate of Graphics Faculty at the Academy of Fine Arts in Wrocław and graphics, or more precisely computer graphics is a starting point for her artistic inspiration. An artist, observing a given reality tries to synthesize it, but Sośniak reverses the process. In her pictures „International Soccer Game II” and „Test Pattern” the artist skips the reality and presents computer simulacra. They are not perfect contemporary realizations that make it impossible to differentiate between real and virtual worlds,but ludicrously simplified images as if generated from ZX Spectrum or Commodore 64 – the cult computers of the 80s. At the first sight the low resolution of graphics gives Sośniak’s works inhuman structure, which is emphasized by short texts, referring to computer game commands. That world of 8-bit oldschool pixels is infected by the virus of painting – careless spatters of paint and rough texture of primed canvas show through the dead logics of algorithms. In “Test Pattern”, the central rectangle is woven from pixels arranged into an ornamental carpet. In reality, it’s an artistically improved visualization of Cynthcart, a synthesizer for Commodore 64.
The series “GamES” is given untypical, lengthened form that evokes the shape of screens in primitive sidescroll computer games. Here, the artist inverts the strategy discussed above. It’s not the painting that shows through a computer screen, but pixel-structured elements try to inhabit the world of painting. The backgrounds of these paintings are abstract spaces created with bold, free brush strikes as in New York School classics. They are peopled with figures, constructions and shapes of characteristic pixel like outlines. Randomly dispersed splashes of paint i ndicate that the game is on. Lengthened forms additionally determine the process-like way of looking at the picture. The viewer is unable to see the whole picture, he must proceed along as if he was completing next levels of a computer game.” dr Jakub Dąbrowski

The idea of GamES project concerns not only a game in the field of strictly formal solutions and visual areas, hidden within the microstructural tissue of painting and graphics. It is a consciously-led personal game with the picture and an attempt at defining the reality, its complexity and multi-surface, being observed and experienced in micro- and macro-areas.

Image in process

While constructing an image I am guided by the rule of purity, clarity and transparency of composition. I am fascinated with geometry that orders forms which interest me. I care also about the idea, conception and story, so that they are constructed on a frame that is characteristic of them. Yet to create a graphic story, to make a synthesis, an adequate combination, you often have nothing left than to submit the image to analysis. In the constructed graphic tissues I try to find the order and, despite the very creating process – being emotional many a time, I always try to “listen” carefully to the work of art to adequately eliminate, while creating, those means of expression which are not required by my being-created image that very moment. That continuous ordering and next deconstructing is a process that uncompromisingly leaves traces of creation, which I eventually try not to be ashamed of in the image. Being often schematic, but symbolically much saturated, the set of precisely-selected elements is every time meant to present a subjective comment on depicted issue.
Both in painting and computer graphics, besides strongly defined construction-frame, planned composition and space, I take the liberty of being much nonchalant and expressing much gesture, plain emotions. I spread the space of created image so flexibly that I could move freely on its axes. Uneven surface of the canvas, computer’s screen – composed of pixels – displaying graphics, and vector, figure-shaped, flat in form and color composition thus become a diagram, a board, a record of the whole creating process. I have a penchant for linearity and horizontality. I believe that in an oblong format there is some kind of harmony being able to hold a space necessary to unfold the plot. What is most important to me in creating an image is to grasp and touch the heart of the matter by all means. To define, study and reveal encrypted meanings and ideas. A sense of space, distance between its particular elements of picture, its depth and sharpness, are also not without significance. Exploring a secret of visual scale from rich, dense, decorative painting matter, seen as if “from afar”, to a single monochromatic pixel, is my great passion and fascinates me overwhelmingly.