Natura Ingenio
What might be most surprising in contact with Emilia Karwowska’s artwork is the fact that the young artist is so versatile. She gets along in the domain of graphic arts with great skill and sensitivity. She creates impressive works in both planographic printing (lithography, offset) and intaglio techniques (etching, aquatint).
One can see that the artist is still searching, and what is most important, she skillfully uses her successive technological accomplishments, in accordance with the assumed artistic goal. The learnt and mastered tools are applied appropriately to achieve the desired effect.
The individual series of works are therefore different from one another, even though nature is Emilia Karwowska’s main area of interest. She portrays its various manifestations, giving in selected works both a fuller, more imitative image of a chosen quotation from nature and its impression or merely allusive or even abstract equivalent of a fragment of the surrounding reality.
In the series of aquatints a similar motif – a fragment of a landscape – acquires a different expression in each print, despite the fact that the artist used the same matrix many times. The horizon is placed very low in these works. This makes it possible to convey a whole range of moods which depend to a large extent on the play of colours, but not only. The use of a different kind of drawing of clouds in several prints causes the sky in these works to take on the mask of tranquillity as well as to be the component of a heroic landscape. In the process of perception, feelings typical of encounters with works that are close to abstraction, in which planes of different weight and qualities of colour stand against each other, come to the fore. In the works that create the image of the four seasons, the artist has used the same matrix again. This allowed her to put emphasis on means which, while preserving similar pictorial motifs, would make it possible to obtain the impression of changeability and, at the same time, circulation and return. Apart from aquatint, etching also appears in these prints. The images of trees introduce elements of movement and expression into the landscape. Vertical accents contrast with subtle, iridescent transitions of horizontal planes of colour. Thanks to the appropriately selected qualities that characterize the components of the composition, we get the impression that the author intends to create a complete image of the phenomenon by means of permutations of its various images.
The works made in soft-ground etching technique resemble drawings made with a pencil or crayon. The author has consciously and skillfully used the attributes of the chosen technique, creating sketchy, slightly blurred images of a fragment of nature, focusing on the play of lines and delicate colour chords.
Even more synthetic are the transpositions of frames taken from nature in lithographs and offset prints. The elements of reality have been reduced to forms close to lyrical abstraction, a kind of sign expressing an experience. It seems that Emilia Karwowska’s works are also a reflection of the inner world of the author, of different types of weather in the world of her experiences and emotions.
Emilia Karwowska approaches nature with respect. She treats it as a source of constant inspiration, an inexhaustible collection of artistic and personal, emotional ecstasies.

Dariusz Leśnikowski

Transl. Elżbieta Rodzeń-Leśnikowska