The Bug River - Dusk

Portrait and landscape - these are the two main themes in Stanisław Baj's paintings. The dominant one seems to be the image of nature along the Bug River, the backwaters of the lazily flowing river on the eastern borderlands of Poland. Still wild, untamed by man, observed from his earliest years and immortalised on canvas, they seem a nostalgic, sometimes ephemeral memory. The painter portrays the changing immediate surroundings of the place of his childhood - the small village of Dołhobrody. „Happy is the person and creator who has their own source,” Stanisław Baj is wont to say. On his canvases he uses the means of expression characteristic of the Young Poland artists. He paints en plein air, paying particular attention to light depending on the time of day or the season. He is a keen observer of the changes taking place in nature. Stanisław Baj's work proves that it is worth having fixed points of reference. For him these may be the Bug River, traditional craft, or his ties with the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts, where he received his diploma in 1978 and has been a professor since 1982.