In a space of drawings

He is able to cover every wall in an art gallery with drawings or a studio with small handmade pictures glued to all available surfaces. His surprising, funny, sometimes shocking works are based on childrens' notebooks' drawings. Antoni Sieczkowski collects his own ideas from the past and he confronts them with a nonchalant imagination of an adult drawer

Crazy debut

The exhibition was called „Draw, don’t fuck around”. Antoni, who studies Graphics, had been drawing on the walls of the small gallery “Turbo” for a week. He was covering a bare wall with astonishing and surreal pictures. During the opening, the guests watched a desk, pieces from his childhood and other meaningful stuff taken from the drawer’s room. His debut exhibition was like an invitation to the imaginative world of a brilliant illustrator, who creates art wherever he can find a pen and a piece of paper. I decided to do something unconventional, a response to the place and to the idea. That’s why I moved some stuff from my room to the Turbo gallery. And so I was drawing. I wanted to show that drawing is a part of myself; something without the beginning or the end. I wanted to place this process in the universe for a while. I wanted to show it –Antoni is recalling. In the end, all the walls had to be repainted white. I didn’t feel sad about it. Somebody else did it, to be honest. There is a huge photo documentation of this exhibition. I was even thinking about some kind of a tournee, I wanted to travel with this project around the country.

Antoni surprised everyone during the outdoor workshop for drawers as well. Sometimes, when I wait for my computer to turn on, I draw something on the small cards. They are always around. I brought 1500 cards or more. I made pictures on them and glued them to the walls of the whole studio.    

Cut out from the childhood

No sophisticated words, pretentious theories or complicated philosophy. Antoni Sieczkowski, as an artist, is influenced by comics and cartoons. I was watching them like a lunatic between 1997 and 2001 –he is recalling. I was really into it. Cartoons from Cartoon Network were visually insane, not very proper for kids, rather for silly adults. I found them fascinating. A lot of ass and so on. Very weird things, which definitely influenced my current work, in a formal way. The same thing is about the comics. What was interesting for me, it was the visual side of it, not the story. Antoni describes his relations with serious art in a very honest way. Nothing really inspired me when I was young, this is something completely different from what I do.  I used to find high art very irritating and awfully pompous. Right now I’m very into artistic world. But things which I like are these ones that don’t treat themselves too seriously, for example work of Ziółkowski or Łódź Kaliska. I really enjoyed a book about dreams called “TRAUMTAGEBUCH”, written by Bosacki and illustrated by Bąkowski. I also find Paweł Althamer’s art meaningful and inspiring. It’s about social problems, not criticism.

Antoni’s drawings are often based on ideas from school. He respects childrens' imagination and he is a real collector. When I was a kid, I used to take notes in a special way. First I was writing, then I was drawing on margins at the same time. And in the end I was only drawing. My memory works even better this way, I have more associations with pictures then with words. So I started to collect these drawings from notebooks. Right now I have a whole box filled with them. I copy these ideas, I add something to them, I make collages from them. And in the end I get a new picture based on my ideas from school. I’m a collector, totally.

Diploma and reading

It’s not easy to meet Antoni at The Academy of Fine Arts, because he prefers to work at home. I’ve been reading a lot for the last 3 years. Not only books, but newspapers as well. I try to expand my knowledge about the world. This year he should complete his diploma project. It will be about my adventure with reading, actually. It’s going to be a book for people, who like to read and to watch pictures at the same time. It will be about drawing and about illustrators. It doesn’t mean that I’m working on a lexicon. It will be something very subjective.

Antoni designed the title hedgehog of this blog. This is his flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/antoni1/6964022274/in/photostream

 and blog: http://kropkiwpaski.blox.pl/html