Colourism in Polish Painting and its Influence on my (Formal) Artistic Exploration

The work addresses the issues of colour in painting in an analytical way. It refers in particular to a unique phenomenon in European art, namely the Polish colourism, represented by outstanding artists active in the 1920s and 1930s. The discussed history of colour, the expansion of which was already noticeable at the turn of the 15th and 16th centuries thanks to the Venetian painting, allows for a chronological approach to the subject against the changing role of the colour structure of the painting, which is observed in the subsequent periods. The conducted analysis of artistic attitudes that influenced contemporary Polish art allows to identify a tendency characterized by individualism, which seems to make the colour the basic foundation of a painting work. This practice was based on the intuitive use of colour patches in the foreground, whilst still using the compositional structure. This is visible in the works of many artists, such as Artur Nacht-Samborski or Piotr Potworowski. The author of this study defines his inspirational space, which results from a thorough knowledge of the Polish colourism and an in-depth analysis of particular works, in the stylistic and technological sense. Indicating the most important features of his own painting created an opportunity for him to trace the consequences of the search for a distinctive creative expression, which was to be the main assumption of the presented work.