Like the majority of people, I love to travel.
I have already been in such countries like (going from East to the West; excluding Poland): Ukraine, Lithuania, Romania, Greece, Hungary, Slovakia, Czechia, Croatia, Austria, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Holland, Spain, and the USA. In general, I believe that visiting new places can be genuinely inspiring, developing, and educating. But, there is some mysterious exception. Zdzislaw Beksinski, the famous Polish painter, was rarely traveling in his life. Although Beksinski’s artworks reached far more than the Polish borders, Beksinski wasn’t going abroad.
I wonder how it is possible that someone who was not traveling much his life was able to create such marvelous, mysterious, “Boschian” paintings.
Why Beksinski rarely traveled, maybe because of illness? No, he just did not like this activity. How is it possible that Beksinski, without any new, external, fresh insights from the surroundings, could create many unreal artworks? I do not know the answer to this question. But, the fact is that the more I am wandering through the streets of Warsaw, the more I try to “travel” through my mind, my imagination. What is more, I try to find the answers to bothering my questions. I am sure that the more I create, the faster I am coming toward the answers.
I believe that it is not the external factors which can provide us the real inspirations. The more I create, the more convinced that the internal imagination can give us a creative boost.
Of course, the two facts mentioned above are connected. I do not know how he would look at Beksinski’s art if he had moved to the US, for example, during his life. Why did I write about the USA? In 1960 The Guggenheim Museums and Foundation in NYC offered a scholarship to Beksinski. A famous Polish painter refused to move to the US.
What is sure for me is that we can derive inspirations, inventions, and ideas from our inner voice, not necessarily from external factors. In one of my previous posts, I have already written that we already have everything necessary to create art. We call it imagination. Is that mean that I want to be the same as Beksinski and spend the rest of my life in one country? Of course not. There was only one Beksinski. I want to travel as much as possible.
