“I’m a mixed entity…”
David Zimmerman in conversation with Andrzej Malag
David Zimmerman: How did you get interested in art?
Andrzej Malag: I think it’s impossible to get interested in art – suddenly, from some external influence. It must be inside, from the very beginning (meaning in a creative aspect). Basically, all children like to draw or paint and this is their natural form of expression. But usually they gradually ’grow out’ of that. In some cases, however, this process has defects. In my case a stimulator was probably the atmosphere of my surroundings – Szczecin (a city in the north-western corner of Poland) – seaport, shipyard, wide reservoirs of the Szczecin lagoon and proximity to the sea. I asked my parents to enroll me to an Art Studio of the Youth Culture Center – still before I started primary school.
David Zimmerman: What is the most challenging aspect of your work?
AM: The most tedious, nervous and time consuming is a period before starting to paint or to construct digital graphics. The problem is with finding an interesting original idea and then sufficiently precisely imagining myself the incoming image. And finally, at some moment of these heavy thinking I start to draw sketches (in the case of painting).
DZ: What is your artistic process? How do you create your graphic works and paintings?
AM: After the exercises described above, I usually have pretty clear concept of what I want to do. It is often accepted that the whole surface of a new composition should be covered with paint as quickly as possible – even very roughly, which allows for introductory establishing proportions of colors and contrasts in the composition according to the concept. It can be optimized during further work up to the figure recognized by the author as final. I know this, but I could never meet this rule. As a result, when I’m close to cover the whole surface, the picture is quite close to be finished. I suspect, it’s not only my problem. The cost is that created image has a wider margin to ‘lead itself‘. Is it wrong?
Concerning the digital graphics – in order to obtain interference effects, I used sub-millimeter-sized masks. The laser beam passing through them is partially deflected at the edges (diffraction), and the deflected component beams overlapping each other create interference images on the screen (e.g. a CCD matrix), depending on several parameters like the designed shape and size of the mask and the laser beam parameters. The registered interference images are the ‘starting material’ for further graphic processing which is the main creative stage, inspired from various sources. This is how I came up with ‘interference photo-graphics’. I also usually have a fairly clear concept of composition, but ‘technology’ is quite different – there are no sketches because of possibility of trials and corrections in multi-layered environment of an editing application.
DZ: Do you have any particular goal in mind when your start a new piece?
AM: In fact, I think, it’s explained above. Inventing the topic of work and a fairly accurate concept of composition is what I can’t start without. Maybe it’s a kind of mental defect ?
DZ: How do you know when the painting is finished?
AM: The explanation is similar – having the vision of the composition, I know when ‘I’m close’, with an accuracy to the above mentioned ‘image self-leading’. At some moment I come to the conclusion that further improvements can only worsen.
DZ: Has your practice changed over time?
AM: I think, not too much – I’m still faithful to the oil technique, only the painting styles evolved, which was connected with various sources of inspiration. At the beginning there were marine landscapes influenced by Szczecin climates. Later I turned to more cubic and geometric styles, a bit under influence of Synthetic Cubism, but not only. In turn, what I called abstraction (but still having landscape features) was influenced by my professional activity (electronics, wave optics, semiconductor laser technology) and cosmology I read about in popular science journals. More recently I became interested in the Magic Reality with elements of antiquity and in abstraction again. These changes were accompanied by somewhat various techniques of painting. The definitely new step was my entering into digital graphics, basing on previously recorded 2D interference images. Everything was new here and I could do it, having suddenly more time after retiring.
DZ: Which artists are you most influenced by?
AM: At the Szczecin Youth Culture Center my master, whom I value the most, ‘indoctrinated’ me with Antiquity. And this still remains. So the first influence – Masters of Antiquity. And then Renaissance and earlier Italian Trecento – looking a bit primitive, but it isn’t at all.
The painter whose album I recently open most frequently is William Turner – sea painter, precursor of Impressionists. I am impressed by the imagination of painters from the Hudson River School of Art. Among Polish artists, I still remember paintings of Anna Gutner and somehow important is Zdzislaw Beksinski. Very important influence (besides professional ones) comes from lectures of popular science books concerning modern quantum physics. Here I’m under influence of Dr. Jim Baggott’s and Prof. Lee Smolin’s books.
DZ: How would you define yourself as an artist?
AM: I feel, I’m a mixed entity. Over the main part of my life I was a research worker dealing with semiconductor optoelectronics. More intense artistic activities were at the beginning and now. I’ve never entirely suspended artistic activities, however, even when I didn’t have enough time.
Now, being retired, art is my main activity. The main benefit of such a history is that my scientific/technical interests gave me original experience, a field of imagination and some tools I can apply now in art trials. I would never learn that in ‘real’ art schools.
DZ: What are you working on now?
AM: Currently I’m working on a composition in convention of the magic reality based on myths of Greek antiquity. Then I plan to return to more abstract compositions, maybe with trials of depicting space in some different manner.
DZ: What is importance of art in our society?
AM: Limiting only to visual arts, their widespread social presence is the function of egalitarian society. Advertisements, decorations and interior design can have a very different art level; In general, these are places for the creation of very good works. A separate field is creation for the broadly understood internet. The whole market is the domain of digital art. Then, let’s say, more ‘elite art’ – the one presented in real and internet galleries, seems to me to experience a regression. In galleries the painting (oil, acrylic) and traditional graphics are generally preferred (not to mention the sculpture that is quite separate). This can be OK, but I cannot understand critics, jurors and other people decisive in this market, who often prefer really primitive (at least in my opinion) artworks despite the very interesting creations appear as well. On the other hand, galleries have difficulties to accept digital artworks. It is difficult to notice another possibility of creating esthetics, for new spaces and recipients. You can envy the sphere of music, in which, without depreciating classics, in the modern and new music the participation of electronics is huge or dominant and fantastic works are created, which certainly e.g. Mahler, Bax, Britten and Beethoven would be happy to listen (at least before losing his hearing, because he probably could not understand the current way of recording music).