ANDRZEJ STRUMILLO
(born on October 23, 1928 in Vilnius)


By Way of Curriculum Vitae

When a child, I imagined the heavens up above, a paradise full of colorful birds, and that an arrow shot high from a good bow would bring a wonder bird back with it to lie at my feet.

Such a time may have arrived and the arrow is on its way back. In the meantime I have survived the World War II, losing my father, the country of my childhood and a lot of illusions. In the middle of the war I made drawings of pine trees and studied icicles hanging from the roof. I also tried my hand at painting the hooves of General Voroshilov's horse in oil paint. After the war, I enrolled in the School of Fine Arts in Lodz, Poland, as a student no. 15 on the list and at my mother's impassioned request I also took up studies at the Humanities Department of the Lodz University. It was in Lodz that I was lucky enough to meet Wladyslaw Strzeminski. His influence opened my eyes for the first time and I am grateful to him. With Strzeminski we discussed not only art; we reminisced on the Minsk region where he, my father and our relatives had all come from. I can still see clearly today the austere, beautiful face of Strzeminski although half a century passed since his sad funeral.

I cannot say I have always been his faithful disciple but I am ever closer to his "white silence". I graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow, the Faculty of Painting. Andrzej Wroblewski was my friend. His life was a short one but his “Execution” (Polish “Rozstrzelanie”) is to my mind the best of the paintings that tried to cope with the war time, maybe the best painting produced by our generation. Let this statement be considered my credo.

I have seen a lot in my life. My journeys through the mountains, deserts, steppes, taigas, jungles, across the seas and oceans and through civilizations and time have thought me tolerance, relativity and brought me closer to accepting fate. Art seemed to me such a natural act of existence as everything else to be found between birth and death.

I shall skip here the list of things I have accomplished over several decades in the field of painting, drawing, graphics, book illustration, the art of arranging exhibitions, scenography, photography and poetry. I shall not mention the awards and successes nor the setbacks, humiliations and defeats that fate, anxious to preserve the balance, did not spare me. Many a time I had to earn my living doing things that were trivial, expedient, foreign to me. For a number of years I was an assistant reader and a professor of painting. For two years I was an officer with the United Nations Organization in New York, heading a graphic design studio there. Manhattan gave me everything that an urban civilization could offer. I visited hundreds of galleries and thousands of exhibitions marked by the "I am the best" mentality and presenting the drama of existence in loud terms. Beyond all that there is nothing more deserving than silence. Falling asleep under the Brooklyn Bridge I wandered in my mind to the Lithuanian border.

For years now I have been dedicating my time to "the creation of the human environment", working for the protection of the landscape of north-east Poland that is dear to my heart because it also reminds me of the country of my childhood.

In 1954 the fates made me go on a long trip all over China. My wide-open eyes and an urgent need for actions resulted in over 200 drawings that I made during the two-month voyage. I drew in Chinese ink on Chinese paper using a Chinese brush-pencil as the main tool. I watched live faces and autumn landscapes, visited museums and relics of the past, shook hands with outstanding workers and ministers, looked into the eyes of exotic women, listened to the beat of the drums in monasteries while Qi Bashi standing at the door of his house – and his death - waved me goodbye. From the 40-year perspective I can see clearly the importance of that adventure. I faced difficult choices then; one had to do with the study of style and was a choice between a divine calligraphy awaited intuitively and a menial realism required so badly at that time; the other consisted in finding a balance between action and reflection, or between creation and contemplation. If the first perplexity was solved relatively successfully and I can present my works from that time without embarrassment, the second one was beyond me. I just had to get down to work. I made sketches and took snapshots day and night. China was followed by the Khabarovsky country, India, Mongolia, Vietnam, Syria, Turkey, Nepal, Japan, Thailand, again China, India, Mongolia, Vietnam and so on, and so on. A big adventure, big civilizations and big dramas. The spirit most sublime and the matter at its lowest. The vestiges, remnants, fragments and crumbs of what I had seen and touched become my drawings. Today, when sorting out drawers with thousands of photographs, negatives, notes and sketches I can say: this or that was done to no purpose. But is judgment possible out of time?

Not long ago, in a foreword to an exhibition of mine titled "CITY", I wrote "I AM IN DOUBT" as to whether the personal tools given to us can know and express in full the essence of the things beyond. "The Cartesian adage: "cogito ergo sum" (I think, therefore I am) seems to be right only in respect of an individual human being provided with a singular brain and placed within a limited space of experience. A picture of boundless world that cannot be entirely known seems to be truer. Nobody knows the heights of the Meru mountain. Nobody has seen its summit. All a pilgrim will see is grass and pieces of rock on the footpath. Some try to read the rules of the universe based on the shape. Thanks to reflective thinking and our imagination we can see further "beyond the small part" like a Chinese painter of old seeing a tree in a twig, a mountain in a piece of rock, a demon in a sign and death in the pale. All the composite structures – genre pieces, scenes, wide landscapes and accounts of distant lands fraught with their author's judgment seem uncertain today. After years of experience I am fully aware of taking part, together with others, in a dramatic performance drawing aside the heavy curtain of darkness that was supposed to unveil the truth but only unveils subsequent curtains.

From the Auguries of Innocence by William Blake:

To see a World in a Grain of sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.


In 1988, I painted eighteen pictures which make up the PSALMS cycle for the rebuilt synagogue in Sejny. I dedicated that work to the memory of the Jews. In the little town in the Polish-Lithuanian border-land there were often more of them than Poles and Lithuanians. In the years 1860-1870, the Jewish community in Sejny built and impressive prayer-house in the style which was a mixture of the Classical and neo-Gothic. During World War II, that edifice shared the fate of the community. It was a prison and a fertilizer store. Today Sejny boasts the white restored walls of the Beit kneset. I know very well that Pentateuch authoritatively forbade the Jews -and this prohibition was repeated several times - to create figurative works of art. "You shall not make a carved image for yourself nor the likeness of anything in the heavens above, or on the earth below, or in the waters under the earth" - that is what God of Israel told Moses on Mount Horeb. That law forbade to paint the figures of God and man. Synagogues were decorated with painted canopies, tens carpets, cloaks and curtains, as well as folds, lambrequins and fringes. Among plants and flowers, vine shoots, dates and pomegranates, also the signs of the Zodiac, hands and symbolic animals, such as the deer, lion, tiger, eagle, leviathan, and musical instruments were painted. Holy cities and scenes from the Bible were presented in such a way that men were left out. Each wall-painting contained also letter compositions, mainly quotations from Scripture, prayers or dedications to the Founders. There fore I first thought of an abstract homage. Of black-and-grey-and-white painting. Of the painting based on restrained metaphor and suitable austere synthesis. Of the matter which would be coarse, plain, decrepit, burnt-out, downtrodden, dusty, and essentially dramatic. In my search for a language of common communication I reached for the Psalms. "The Psalms are a record of Israel's identity. And more than that. The Psalms, which are sort of identity papers of the individual and the nation, express also superbly the universal character of human reality. That paradox, that contradiction of the concrete and the universal, is only a seeming paradox in the Psalms, as it is the case in each great work of art. Where these two contradictory values appear, a unique, original and universal works is created", I first found inspiration and justification in these words of Father Jozef Sadzik, in his introduction to the most recent polish translation of the Psalms from Hebrew by Czeslaw Milosz, published by Editions du Dialogue, Paris 1979. It might have also been the fault of my imagination which is of illustrative character, or perhaps the influence of medieval anonymous painters. Or maybe the neigbourhood of the village of Krasnogruda, which can be reached from Sejny after an hour’s ride. I felt justified for the second time when a year later I stopped in front of the manor house at Krasnogruda, in the company of the Poet. We were both engulfed by the world of Psalms. The poet hid his face in the shadow of the trees. I thought about the bitterness of passing away and about understanding suffering. It happened that at last this autumn I could present the pictures from the Sejny synagogue the M.K. Ciurlonis Museum in Kaunas. At the opening ceremony the Psalms were recited in Hebrew, Lithuanian and Polish. The Jews from Kaunas admitted to being deeply moved. When my health was drunk with kosher wine in the blue-and-white synagogue, I felt justified for the third time. The winter nights at the village of Mackowa Ruda are long. I read Psalms, selected some of them and particular verses, and made sketches. Finally, I chose eighteen Psalms out of a hundred and fifty. The number equal to the number of the fields outside the synagogue windows. My selection was affected not only by the dramatic parallel to the fate of the Jews, my contemporaries, but also by the visual qualities which inspired my imagination. I avoided mass scenes. Man is solitary here, apart from the double-faced priest and the intertwined couple, the saved and the damned together. Man is accompanied with his attributes and with space. That is all I can do. Man is defined neither by his race nor by his epoch. He stand blind and naked between the sun and the moon, created, as well as these heavenly bodies, out of fiery magna. The Psalmist asks: "O Lord, what is a man that thou carest for him?, What is mankind? Why give a thought to them?" (Ps. 144,3). This is the final question of the cycle.

Mackowa Ruda, autumn 1990



Mandala I
oil on canvas 2004
100 x 100 cm

available


Mandala II
oil on canvas 2004
100 x 100 cm

available

Mandala III
oil on canvas 2004
100 x 100 cm

available



Mandala IV
oil on canvas 2004
100 x 100 cm

available



Mandala V
oil on canvas 2004
100 x 100 cm

available



Mandala VI
oil on canvas 2004
100 x 100 cm

available


Mandala VII
oil on canvas 2004
100 x 100 cm

available


Mandala VIII
oil on canvas 2004
100 x 100 cm

available



Mandala IX
oil on canvas 2004
100 x 100 cm

available

 



Mandala X
oil on canvas 2004
100 x 100 cm

available


Mandala XI
oil on canvas 2004
100 x 100 cm

available

Mandala XII
oil on canvas 2004
100 x 100 cm

available

Mandala XIII
oil on canvas 2004
100 x 100 cm

available





Mandala XIV
oil on canvas 2004
100 x 100 cm

available






Mandala XV
oil on canvas 2004
100 x 100 cm
available



STACK
oil on canvas 1990
120 x 170 cm



STACK-GOLGOTHA
oil on canvas 1990
120 x 170 cm
available


STACK-GOLGOTHA II
oil on canvas 1987
120 x 170 cm
available


MEHRU MOUNTAIN I
oil on canvas 2004
49 x 29 cm
available




MEHRU MOUNTAIN II
oil on canvas 2003
49 x 29 cm
available




MEHRU MOUNTAIN III
oil on canvas 2004
49 x 29 cm
available




MEHRU MOUNTAIN IV
oil on canvas 2004
49 x 29 cm
available




MEHRU MOUNTAIN V
oil on canvas 2003
49 x 29 cm
available




MEHRU MOUNTAIN VI
oil on canvas 2004
49 x 29 cm
available




MEHRU MOUNTAIN VII
oil on canvas 2003
49 x 29 cm
available


 


MEHRU MOUNTAIN VIII
oil on canvas 2004
49 x 29 cm
available




MEHRU MOUNTAIN IX
oil on canvas 2004
49 x 29 cm
available




MEHRU MOUNTAIN X
oil on canvas 2002
49 x 29 cm
available




MEHRU MOUNTAIN XI
oil on canvas 2004
49 x 29 cm
available




MEHRU MOUNTAIN XII
oil on canvas 2004
49 x 29 cm
available





MEHRU MOUNTAIN XIII
oil on canvas 2004
49 x 29 cm
available





MEHRU MOUNTAIN XIV
oil on canvas 2003
49 x 29 cm
available





MEHRU MOUNTAIN XV
oil on canvas 2002
49 x 29 cm
available




MEHRU MOUNTAIN XVI
oil on canvas 2004
49 x 29 cm
available





MEHRU MOUNTAIN XVII
oil on canvas 2004
49 x 29 cm
available