Stanislaw BAJ (b. 1953), River Bug, 2013

oil, canvas; 46 x 55 cm;
Signed p. d.: S. Baj;
On the back described: Stanislaw Baj / River Bug / 2013.

An artist deeply rooted in the nature and culture of his native Podlasie. His paintings, especially his cycles depicting the painter's mother, peasants, neighbors, and earlier also genre scenes from village life, reached a supra-regional dimension and acquired the meaning of a universal description of the culture of village life - as noted in one of the first monographic studies on Baj by Roch Sulima, an anthropologist of Polish village culture. Currently, the painter focuses on paintings of the Bug River, numerous series of which he often presents at exhibitions at home and abroad. In Baja's view, the river with its entire spectrum of colors, lights and matter becomes a symbol of the passage of time, transience, but also of the primordial organic force that gives life and death. The painter was born in 1953 in Dolhobrody. At the Faculty of Painting at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts, he studied under Michał Bylina and Jacek Sienicki, and completed his diploma with honors under Ludwik Maciąg, with whom he was an assistant from 1978. Pro-rector of the Academy of Fine Arts for two terms. Currently runs a painting studio at his alma mater. Full professor.