Maria Magdalena z pêdzlem i olówkiem
Maria Magdalena with Brush and Pencil

Summary/Abstract: Aldona Mickeiwicz tries to find harmony and order in the reality. She is interested in ‘the spirituality of the matter’. She paints ‘the spirits’ of jars, bread and even a drop of water. She likes simple, deformed, used objects. She considers them as documents of their owners’ existence. Her compositions often wear the marks of pain, and she wants to comfort them by carefully painting their delicate and fugitive forms. She doesn’t paint people, but people are present in her pictures. The artist tells us their stories while telling us the stories of things which belonged to them. She seems to believe that objects are reliquaries of their owners. She shows details of things. Her still life studies are filled with images of such things as glasses, jars, eggs, birds’ wings, and fish bones. Mickiewicz follows the style of classical ‘vanity’ pictures. Her ‘Donkey’s Meal’ (1988), for example, shows a hay mattress, and ‘An Old Counterpane’ (1991) shows small feathers which fell from a counterpane. The artist approaches the reality with great empathy. Her art can be considered as existential , as ‘existential’ are things which support our own existence, such as a wash-tub brought by her mother from the town in Eastern Poland to bathe the little baby Aldona in another town, where her parents settled after WWII.

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