REMEMBERING Zdzisław Beksiński
The late Beksinski was a Polish artist best known for his unsettling paintings depicting hellish landscapes, dismembered beings and brutal architecture. Everything is larger than life and the subject matter towers over the viewer.
Toned down color pallets, very rustic. Subject matter that gives you a baad feeling in your stomach, extreme nihilism. Hatred toward authority, government, the church, crowd mentality. You know, all the good in the world.
What makes Beksinksi stand out so much is that t’s not a gimmick. The terror that his work brings isn’t novelty. It’s not based around blood and gore, most of the time no harm is ever shown. What’s so settling is the sense of familiarity, but a skewed one, one that displays the worst possible outcomes of the decisions we’ve made on Earth.
But Beksinski would be the first to tell you that his work doesn’t really mean anything, he’s not trying to communicate a message, he doesn’t want to get a point across, he just paints what his heart tells him to
“Meaning is meaningless to me. I do not care for symbolism and I paint what I paint without meditating on a story.”
So don’t think to deep into it. Instead soak up the feeling it gives you, focus on that. That’s what its about.
I don’t know if I believe that 100%. Imagine having a good day, you go and sit down to paint somethin but you just don’t know what to paint. So you start to freestyle and you end up painting this….
You’d probably be a little surprised with your creative decisions that led to this. It feels like his work is way to specifically disturbing to not know why you’re painting id so disturbing.
Maybe that makes it even more disturbing…
No matter how hard interviewers tried to get any sort of explanation of what his work was about, when talking to Beksinski. He’s always so sure that his paintings don’t mean a thing. No symbols, no metaphors, just imagery.
Does it need to mean anything? He brought up a point one time, that made a lot of sense.
It’s not like we stare at a beautiful painting of a grassy pasture landscape and ask what it means. We just like it because its beautiful.
So all of the barren lands, sad faces, deforming skins, dismembered bodies, religious overtones, and loaming deities mad out of bones are definitely not symbols and don’t mean a thing,..
But if you understand that Beksinski was a Jewish person in Poland who lived through the entirety of World War II, the subject matter seems a little bit more clear to you. One could only imagine that these painting may allude to the destruction of our planet from war or the genocide of over 6 million people led by the Nazis.
But don’t think about it too much…
With the landscapes of the times here on earth currently, all of this stuff doesn’t seem to far off. Its only fiction until its not.
If you’re not aware… now way more than ever, people are sick, jobless, depressed and broken. It seems like all who got lucky are still under the scrutiny of a broken world and Beksinski is the person I think about on a daily basis, because his paintings have become real life again.
The Tragic Death of Zdzislaw Beksinski
Beksinski died tragically when he was murdered by an acquaintance on February 21, 2005 in Warsaw, Poland at the age of 75. He was stabbed about 17 time by his caretakers teenage soon, they seemed to of had a disagreement about Zdzislaw loaning him a couple of hundred dollars. Rough.
The good die young, but they also die old as well. Rest your soul Beksinki.
