WŁADYSŁAW MIRECKI
Water Colours from 2010 & Selected Works

Władysław Mirecki

Władysław Mirecki paints the Essex landscape of the Colne Valley where he lives, not far from the Stour beloved of Constable and more recently, john Nash. He works exclusively in watercolour, with great conviction. Contrary to the popular belief that watercolour has to be right first time, Mirecki is constantly changing and re-working his images. He lifts off colour with clean water or removes paint with sandpaper or scalpel. His paintings evolve over time.

In the late 1990s, Mirecki began to find his own voice as an artist. He took pains to play down the evidence of the medium or the brush, and his ideal surface became one in which the paint dried on the paper without benefit of expressiveness, either in terms of brush-marks or too-evident veils of wash. The various layers — the base colour, perhaps pink or ochre or black, with which Mirecki subdues the terrifying blank sheet, then the water—soluble pencil drawing to rough out the composition, then the successive applications of paint — should all bond with the paper into a single harmonious surface.

Parallel with this technical development has been a change of working habit: Mirecki no longer works en plein air, but researches a subject thoroughly before re-creating it in the studio. He might use photos or he might gather an armful of wild flowers to ensure verisimilitude, but his process now is not simply recording the face of nature. Time-conscious outdoors notation has been replaced by an altogether lengthier contemplation as he makes a deeply considered and formally ordered equivalent of what he sees.

Constable was famously indicted for painting nature green when it was commonly thought that landscape should be as golden—brown as a Claudian idyll. Mirecki sometimes sees himself fighting the same battle in his own emphasis on green. He is impatient with wiseacres who remark how difficult a colour green is. “No more difficult than red", he responds. ‘And white is the most dangerous colour, because of its high energy." But revealingly he does identify an animosity to green in the national temperament, a manifestation of the Puritanism that keeps surfacing in public and private life. He sees the Puritan urge to grey and brown as a denial ofthe energy of one particular strand of our culture: the green force that drives the Green Man, and is symbolised in the Lincoln Green of that arch-revolutionary Robin Hood. Certainly Modernism disliked the lushness of green foliage (Mondrian pulled the blinds down when travelling through the verdant English countryside), but now it’s time to run the gamut of our viridescence again. Władysław Mirecki laments the infantilism of contemporary culture, and against the progressive cry of ‘simplify’, he counter-poses “unify’. His work is the opposite of approximate, vague, expressionist: it is precise, clear, unemotional. He deals in subtle and complex harmonies which reveal aspects of our surroundings we are apt to take for granted. Above all, his work celebrates the beauty of ordinary reality.

Andrew Lambirth, art critic of The Spectator.