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Spraygraphic Interview with International Artist Wiesław Jarmulowicz
By Spraygraphic | May 14, 2008
Spraygraphic’s Chuck b. interview with International Artist Wieslaw Jarmulowicz about his art making process, his European influences, and and his most recent artwork.
Spraygraphic Interview with Wiesław Jarmułowicz
SG: Please tell us about yourself?
WJ: I was born in a polish village amidst a beautiful Jurassic landscape. My parents worked day and night so I was raised by wild animals. I spent days among Jurassic monad rocks and streams teeming with trout, wading in a stream watching little fish play, catching them in a jar, watching their fragile bodies against the summer sun. I wished the stream would flow through my room so I could lie on the bed and watch all the treasures of the stream flow by. One day when watching the life in the stream a beautiful trout with red dots came up to me and said: Come with me, you should leave your negligent parents and follow me to the source, where I live. And I followed the trout thirty years later. I started to paint at the age of 35 because of a Great Jungian Dream in which I drew my paintings and sculptures out of a black-red water-lava lake under the surface of the earth. After a few months of training I even passed very difficult entry examinations at the Fine Art Academy in Cracow !
SG: Where do you currently live and work?
WJ: Currently I am forced to live with my parents in a small village of Ciagowice/ Poland which I hate. This is a horrible place where people do nothing else but be born, marry, make new children, watch them grow, marry and make new children and die. First come birthday parties then first communion parties then wedding parties and then funeral parties. And between all these parties there is only shopping fucking drinking fighting for power and watching TV.
SG: What mediums do you work with?
WJ: I try to work with all mediums I can find. I try not to distinguish between noble, precious mediums on one hand and cheap mediums on the other hand (like my colleagues from the fine arts academy do favoring oil paint ). I use acrylics, pastels, aquarelle, animal fat, sugar, honey, milk, charcoal, plaster, colored crayons, ink and pen. A few weeks ago I started to work with dough. The only medium I do not use is oil paint. I hate its pungent smell and its viscous heavy texture reminding me of dumb, humorless people without fantasy. Their realistic oil paint could never take up in the sky and fly. It would rather pull you under the surface of the earth down to a blind moles hole. Using oil paint seems to me as if I would paint with clay. Try to imagine birds made of clay, they will never fly. I prefer to use clay for my sculptures.
SG: Describe your working process when creating a new work.
WJ: There has to be an important dream first. If the dream is really important I remember it for years. It’s energy is still there. Sometimes I write the dream down in my diary. Then I pick up the most significant symbol of such a dream and try to give it a form of a drawing, painting, object or whatsoever. There are rather to many elements in my dreams then to few. I have always to reduce the number of elements I am going to render.
SG: What kind of things do you do when you get blocked or find it hard to create something?
WJ: I read. Most of what I read concerns psychology or mythology or handbooks on such subjects as: growing cacti or other plants or how to cook the soup bouillabaisse. I do not like to read fiction.
SG: Where are you currently finding your inspiration?
WJ: In my dreams, in the psychological literature I am reading, in my obsessions (I am still obsessed with some things) and in the work of other painters no matter what period. I try not to distinguish between periods. Rembrandt is as good as Picasso . Painting is not literature where you can find lots of works of historical value only. Spoken, written language is aging much faster then the language of pictures.
SG: Can you please tell us a little about your piece, Blue Library.
WJ: Many years ago I had a dream in which I come from my day at work and see that the number of my flat, the number seven turned upside down. Maybe I turned it upside down myself like a lock from a safe. After I did this the number seven turned into the letter "j" . I pushed the door and entered my flat, but this was not my place anymore. This was a library. I saw rows of book shelves with lots of old blue books on them, I opened one thick blue book and tried to read it. I only remember that there were signs and pictures in it. I can recall one series of pictures with my face changing during an orgasm J
Much later I considered the books to be the holy bible of my body, with millions of pages of holy knowledge in it. Since the human body is build of carbon mainly I used coal with its millions of layers to render it. Coal pages should symbolize the knowledge of the body. Coal as material is very old , it "remembers" the times of dinosaurs. I made a whole series with coal animals and a coal car. I see also a similarity between coal and God. Both things remember the ancient time, both things are kind of fossils. Both things are black like black boxes of planes.
SG: Can you please tell us a little about your painting, Honey and Blood.
WJ: It is a part of my obsession with malefemale body, a body that is an opened, ever spurting source of life. In Greek mythology you can find such creature, it is called Silenus . He is the father of all divine children, he is caring for them, protecting them, feeding them. He has a huge saggy beer gut, which is an equivalent of female breast. His penis is also another breast. He is full of breasts feeding the divine child with milk, honey, blood and sperm. His body is suffused from inside with blood, milk, honey and fat. C.G. Jung would probably call the whole complex The Self. I think Cézanne was possessed by the same complex. His series Temptations of St. Anthony is about this complex. There are fat female bodies made of dough (Silenus) with male heads (Hermes) who are tempting Cézanne. As far as I know Cézanne was in love with a person who had a female body and a male head (Perhaps it was Emil Zola). His series "Bathers" also renders bodies which are hermaphroditic.
SG: Can you please tell us a little about your poetry (teksty). In what ways does it influence your paintings, sculpture, and/or drawings?
WJ: I started to write poetry long before I started to paint. It was painting that had influence on my poetry. I wanted my poems to be pictures. And they are in fact descriptions of pictures. I do not use words that are abstract. When I do not see a picture (before my inner eye) hearing your word I do not understand what you are saying. Everything has to be a picture. I wanted my poetry to be solid like an object. I introduced cubism into my poetry describing physical objects from many points of view. I made my poems like paintings of Mondrian: cold, objective, flat, square. No ghosts. No metaphors. No death. It was a kind of anti-poetry. Now I am fed up with it. I want my poetry to be subjective.
SG: Where has your work been seen?
WJ: Up till now I took part in a few exhibitions at the fine arts academy where I studied. I had one solo exhibition at a Spanish club "El Duende" in Cracow. My solo exhibition at ABC Gallery in Poznan/Poland which represents me on the art market.
SG: What is your dream art assignment?
WJ: As Rainer Maria Rilke once put it in his poem:
Archaic Torso of Apollo
We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,
gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.
Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:
would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star:
for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.
I do not know if it is clear enough. My dream art assignment is changing my life and the lives of other people through my art.
SG: What is your favorite color?
WJ: There are two colors that are meaningful to me. Blue of lapis lazuli and green. It was always emerald green. I remember as a child very often seeing a doctor when I was ill, in his waiting room there was a poster on the wall depicting a pond with grass, cane and anglers fishing. Everything was emerald green, the pond, the grass, the cane and the anglers. I soothed myself diving into that emerald green pond. I had a fever very often so diving into that pond brought me a relief. It cooled down my feverish head. I have dreams with huge emeralds. I have plates of green in my studio. Every spring I fantasize about eating young green leaves so that my whole body would be filled with green to the rim. I did some drawings rendering me vomiting green leaves.
Last night I had a dream with starry night sky which had the color of lapis lazuli. There were space ships in the sky and satellites. The whole cosmos was full of life. I taught that I should be afraid of the "aliens", I ran for cover in a wood of old oaks. Now I think "they" did not want to do any harm to me.
SG: Who is your favorite artist? And Why?
WJ: I do not like this word "favorite" . It sounds to me like saying: What is your favorite flavor of the pudding, or who is your favorite pop singer. I cannot ask this question about such things like religion or science.
My most meaningful artist is still Paul Klee . When I was psychically dying I started to paint the way Klee did. I played with materials and colors like a child. Looking at Klee I thought painting was easy, everybody could paint so could I. I this way I coped with that stumbling block they taught me in school. "All artists are heavenly creatures who were given from God to such institutions like schools, churches, states, museums, libraries to administer their work. As a mortal, subdued scholar you could never enter the forbidden and exclusive realm of creation. You could only comment on what somebody else has written or painted, you could by things but you could never create them by yourself. The books written by someone else were always perfect, the paintings painted by someone else were always perfect.
I still have this contempt for my own "hand made" imperfect creations.
SG: What book/magazine are you reading this week?
WJ: I am reading "The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defenses of the Personal Spirit" by Donald E. Kalsched . It is great. I came much closer to understanding what was done to me forty years ago. I did a series of photographs inspired by this book considering my own obsession by the complex of benevolent rescuer and malevolent persecutor.
SG: Ever do a self portrait? Where is it now?
WJ: I did a few self portraits, I even like them somehow. Two of them can be seen at my website :
SG: Where is your favorite place to hang out?
WJ: Now it is the foil tunnel with my cacti. I spend hours watching them grow, caring for them. I take pictures of them in bloom.
SG: Any final words of advice?
WJ: Go and demolish the next TV or Radio station, do it now!
ART: 1. Yellow Water, 2. Blue Library, 3. Dionizos, 4. Fishing in Australia, 5. Honey and Blood, 6. Pachnacy Groszek,
7. Red Aquariams, 8. Soli(j)anna, 9. Triangular Fish, 10. Two Steps to the Left
Topics: Artist Interviews, International-Art |
May 15th, 2008 at 7:30 pm
Congratulations Wies�aw poet !
You are great artist and your inspiring dreams and your art are the own poetry alive.
Abraço desde Brasil.Miriam
May 16th, 2008 at 3:13 am
Wies,
Now I know why your picture on Artmesh is in blue! Good interview Wies, you didn’t bend, you stay yourself….
Love your works.
Mira
May 16th, 2008 at 9:47 pm
Wies’s interview was one of the most enjoyable to read and learn from…thanks again…chuck b.
May 17th, 2008 at 9:06 am
You�re scary mate. Honey and sugar bakes that no one could stomach. You sound like Dostoyevsky in a really grumpy mood. You get egotistical to the point of wanking dreams. And I guess that can give some of us a chortle. (From your meshy friend, InitiallyNO, the magical comic mixed media/oil painting dreamer whose blind cat stands at the edge of the never ending semantic well.)