bio and art statement

bio

Born in Poland, in the historic town of Brzeg, Andrzej grew up during the years of political oppression and era of communist Poland. There he attended the School for the Arts and Literature. Unconsciously, these primary years were the platform for a deep attraction towards peace, poetry and art as a form of creative preservation.

In 1984, Andrzej moved to New York and continued his education at the School for the Arts at Jersey City State University. While he was earning his a BFA in painting, Andrzej had the opportunity to explore everything from sculpture to printmaking, drawings to graphic art. These years were pivotal processing years. At the end of the 5-year BFA program, Andrzej earned a Master’s Degree and Honorary Award in Urban and Landscape Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania in the field of Urban Architecture in 1994. Architectural design taught him to observe and imitate nature through new media. The rigorous nature of the field transformed Andrzej’s creative approach away from objectifying the world and towards autonomy through painting.

After relocating to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1994, Andrzej’s artistic direction began to take shape after integrating Eastern spirituality into his artwork. For him, Eastern Spirituality and forms of Zen, mediation and Buddhism was closer to seeing world as beautiful rather than violent as he has in his early years.

Andrzej’s artistic philosophy led him to resume his academic work at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco where, in 2010, he received a Masters in Integral Psychology and a certification in Expressive Art Therapy.

Andrzej’s current art studio is based in Oakland, where he also dedicates his time to a full time psychotherapy and trauma healing practice. His art pieces are exhibited in Los Angeles, the Greater San Francisco Bay Area, Chicago, Dallas, New York, Boston, Paris and London.

art statement

It is an interesting biological fact that all of us have, in our veins the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean…we have salt in our in sweat, in our tears, in our skin “And when we go back to the ocean – whether it is to sail or to observe it – we are going back to this instinctual belief that we all originate in the gesture of the moving sea. 

If you close your eyes and you listen to your breath, it’s exactly like the quiet waves, gently sounding across the grains of sand. Our urban lives are coupled with the ocean life. And so is our creative personal nature. Our artistic language is familiar, universal and repetitive. We try to interpret what we see and express its emotional understanding. 

By engaging with art we allow ourselves to notice similarity of the feelings that arise.  And that is our collective Nature. That is our universal ability to sense one into another. 

My artwork is an exploration, a gesture which reflects a moment in life, a composition which tells a personal story And as “Nights through dreams tell the myths forgotten by the day.” C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, So do my paintings, narrate events experienced, learned and forgotten and learned again by the human mind.