Drawings from Asia

Andrzej Strumillo has spent many years traveling through various Asian countries. He has been in China and Mongolia. He has penetrated the vast territory of Russian Siberia. He took up various jobs, even during the war in Vietnam. He has also visited India, Nepal, Thailand and Japan. He collected
a great number of Oriental art objects during his trips. Maybe this collection is not as numerous as others but it distinguishes itself by the perfect selection based on the artists unfailing intuition. It is not owing to his university studies but to his experiments and experience that Andrzej Strumillo has become an outstanding connoisseur of the Orient and an artist who embraces and synthesizes the origins of Western and Eastern culture in a harmonious and almost imperceptible way.

It applies not only to his numerous works of art with Oriental themes: Indian or Vietnamese landscapes or images of people from various regions of Asia. Many of his works are thoroughly permeated with ideas and symbolism of the Orient. As an example of that can serve his recent series of composition based on signs of the Buddhist iconography of late Buddhism which he displayed
at the Nusantara Gallery in Warsaw in 1981. Owing to his creative imagination he was able to give them a monumental rank they did not have even in the sacral Buddhist art. Andrzej Strumillo is not the only contemporary Polish artist whose works contain Oriental elements but probably just in his works they are transformed thoroughly and constitute their integral part. I think it is the result of his approach to the people of the Orient which was sincere, close, straightforward and free from any prejudice.

Andrzej Jakimowicz, Zachód a sztuka Wschodu, Wiedza Powszechna, Warszawa 1981