Professor Rybczynski
Letter from Professor Jacek Maria Rybczynski
Though carefully crafted into sentences, words alone fail to capture the essence of Leokadia Makarska Cermak’s creativity. The paintings and drawings, to which the artist devotes her skill, are rich in metaphorical meaning and bear testimony to a higher sensitivity. While these works generally draw at the fountain-head of figurative art, they branch out in two streams: one emotive, the other documentary.
The emotive stream, which translates the artist’s unequivocally poetic ambition, is best exemplified in the “flower portrait” series; here we meet with lifelong companions incorporated in fantastic flora-motifs. The images are arresting. Makarska-Cermak’s self-avowed fascination with nature’s beauty is coated with a layer of symbolism: the flower as the mystical center conveys mystery and discloses at once a perplexing enigma and the logic of events…for the flower alludes to the passage of time, the cycle of birth and demise.
In the documentary stream, the artist explores the classical approach to portrait rendition, aptly depicting the personalities and psyches of her posers. To this end, Makarska-Cermak makes optimal use of the technical possibilities – consisting mainly of oil colors, pastels, and pencils.
The paintings of Makarska-Cermak provoke and invite a deeply individual interpretation and experience of the colorful world of Nature. Imbued with the strong temperament of their author, they steal their way into our hearts. There they will remain.
By Professor Jacek Maria Rybczynski (Mainz, Germany, 1995)
(An artist and a professor of Fine Arts in Munich, Germany)
