Lukasz Milak - Kalinowski, Untitled (Monarch)

oil on canvas, 65 cm x 55 cm

Lukasz Milak-Kalinowski says this about his painting: "My painting is an unrecognized world of imagination, where abstraction mixes with surrealism and depicts real emotions in unreal places and out of time. I am a painter, sculptor and draughtsman coming from a family with a tradition of fine arts, an admirer of visual forms in the broadest sense, a student at the Wladyslaw Strzeminski Academy of Fine Arts in Lodz, studying painting and drawing. Art from a young child, practically since I remember, was present in my family home. I learned the technique, the workshop from my mother and grandmother. Later in my youth I honed the instilled abilities myself. I draw inspiration from literature, observations of the transient environment and sleepless visions. I try to grasp microseconds of present reality, capturing them in my mind as clear memories. They provide a mental "subsoil" for my art and nourishment for my imagination. I am a sentimental man, and my imagination draws from the said past an unprecedented amount. In my work, in addition to the widely understood depiction of emotions, there must be room for sentiment, for references to roots and genealogy. I build references to ourselves, to who we were, how our individual and social fabric changed. It is impossible to be here and now without exploring the primordial source of oneself. The directional spectrum of my work rubs against abstraction, fantasy, surrealism. I try to reflect elementary emotions such as pain, fear, passion, or peace. A clean sub-image is like a "tabula rasa" for me, on which I paint as a sculptor derives a shape with a chisel from a wooden board. I don't explicitly define my painting. According to me, each viewer sees in my paintings a reflection of his consciousness. I mainly use acrylic and oil techniques, creating on sub-paintings made of plates, sheets, sometimes canvases. My paintings are in Polish and foreign collections."