Artist Feature – Hanna Ilczyszyn
“I paint portraits, animals, plants and landscapes. I am interested in the interaction between living creatures and their surroundings because it allows me to convey an atmosphere of nostalgia. The feeling of someone who has been living abroad for many years. In order to stay true to such mood, my work tends to be intuitive. I paint fast. I usually think about my next work for a while, but then the execution is always rather quick. I believe this allows me to follow my intuition and paint in a more expressive way. Also, I enjoy the little imperfections resulting from such process: my goal is to capture a feeling, rather than a perfect image. I want my work to be a constant quest for harmony, a permanent pursuit of balance. When I paint, I usually think of a perfectly peaceful moment, I imagine myself in a field, alone. It’s just before dusk, when the sun slowly goes down and the last rays of light kiss the ground. There is a certain stillness at this time of the day and a beautiful light. You know it will get dark soon, so you should probably go home soon, but you also want this moment to last. I think the feeling of that precise moment, hanging between light and darkness, is something I try to convey with my work. Similar to the impression of waking up from a very vivid dream, when we are still figuring out whether we are still asleep or already awake, and somehow the unconscious story of our dream still lives inside us. Almost surreal in its tension between the old dimension we are leaving and the new one we are entering. In all this, I value humour as a tool to interpret life. The nostalgia, the dreams, the memories feel far too serious at times, almost overwhelming. In my canvasses and drawings, I therefore mix grotesque figures, bold lines and colours, to add a humorous touch.”
Hanna Ilczyszyn is a young Polish painter living in Belgium. She was an MFA student at KASK in Gent, Be, and previously studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Wroclaw, Pl. She has been exhibiting her work at solo and group shows in Taiwan, Japan, China, Austria, Belgium, Germany, Poland, Bulgaria, Spain, Holland, Estonia, Latvia and has been selling her work to collectors around the world.
