Urszula SzulakowskaI have been deeply involved with the international art world and with academia all of my life. I have taught both art history and practical art studies at a number of universities in Australia and Britain. I continue to publish books on art-history, as well as writing catalogue essays for artists exhibiting in Europe, Britain and Australia. I also used to write a considerable amount of art criticism for various journals.
In the past ten years I have been able to focus more intensely on my own art work which is usually in two dimensions and involves all types of media. My preferred medium is pastel and I also work in charcoal and coloured pencil. I have been exhibiting in the annual group exhibitions of the Rugby Art Group and also of the Alchemy art group in Rugby for the past ten years. I am interested primarily in the depiction of landscape and always work in the field directly from the subject. The human figure in a landscape, or townscape setting has become my dominating interest in recent years. I also often travel to the Baltic coast in order to work on seascapes and coastal settings. I prefer to work very freely so that the strokes of my pastel are obvious and I use complex colour schemes, trying to get the effect of shot silk and reflected colour. In my black and white graphic work, I frequently work in a very rough manner, trying to capture the movement of the human figure. However, I also try to retain as much detail as possible of the scene which I am drawing. I am interested in the relationship between realistic detail and the abstract qualities of the medium. At the moment I prefer to leave my marks evident and I rarely rub or smudge the surfaces, although I may work more with the traditional ways of pastel painting in the future. I do like to work as fast as possible on a scene, but then spend days touching up the drawing in the studio. I never work from photographs. I have also worked a lot with quite hard coloured pencils which has been a challenge but has produced some intriguing, quite naïve, drawings that have a fairy-tale quality. My work can become quite illustrative when working with pencils and the narrative element can come to the forefront. |