Tytus Brzozowski is a young Polish architect and painter, who paints rather strange and gentle surreal water colours of his native city Warsaw. Many of his paintings at first glance appear to be completely normal paintings of a beautiful old European city, but when you look a bit closer, you discover that they are really strange… Houses on stilts, balloons with pianos hanging below them and similar.
I suspect he uses water colour rather than oil or acrylic as it gives his paintings a sort of genteel faded quality, which the brilliance of oils and acrylics would tend to destroy.
Curiously enough, he also paints pictures of the most appalling sweetness and banality, which is rather odd. Ghastly paintings of flowers, or landscapes or pretty girls, done in the most “Sunday Painter” manner you could imagine. Not sure why he does this, unless of course it is either that he is taking the piss out of that way of painting, or he is simply a very sentimental young man… No idea. But for whatever reason he does this, it is odd. By the way, he does those sort of paintings with the same technical skill obviously, so they are not unsuitable to hang on the walls of a barbers shop or restaurant.. just not in my home!!!
Here is a sample of that style of painting to give you a taste of that side of the man.
See what I mean? Competent, but in no way remarkable, and certainly not a style of painting I would bother to write about here.
The way in which he more often paints is in much the same style, but the subject matter is odd and much more intriguing, and certainly worth writing about on my blog.
To give you an idea, here is one to tempt you to read on, I hope……
Basically what he seems to do is to paint a straightforward subject, but with at least one unexpected element or twist, such as the legs those houses above are standing on, and seems to enjoy placing totally unconcerned groups of people in his curious cityscapes.
Occasionally he seems to feel like letting rip and loosens all the controls and paints a picture that is totally weird, such as this one below.
He has painted whole series of such paintings, in which scale and content are all over the place, a weird mix of Dali and Hieronymus Bosch, and I have to admit, very much to my liking.
I admit I have no idea what – if anything – he might be trying to say with the above painting, but as generally what the artist has in mind when painting a picture is pretty irrelevant to the viewer, as we all bring to art our own life experiences and prejudices, so what really matters is what we feel a painting is trying to tell us based on our life view, not the artist’s.
By and large his paintings are not far from reality, as you will see in the next couple of images I am going to bung on here now……………..
Um, well perhaps not this one….. One normally does not see such gigantic seagulls on the street… but then, he is known as a sort of fantasist……
The man himself……….
And why not have large balloons carrying grand pianos over the city?
Anyhow, that gives you a small taste of the very considerable output of this eccentric young man.. If you want to see more of his work, simply Google him… the net is full of his work.
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What do you think of this guy’s work? Good, bad or indifferent? Do let us know.
OZTHOUGHTS 