BillLindau

Daniel Sztyber feature

Painter Daniel Sztyber
From Poland to the Sandhills: Artist expresses love of nature in countless paintings
With photos of his painting of the Chernobyl disaster, the artist with his paintings
By: Bill Lindau
Compliments of The Post of Troy
Small places can hold big surprises. Moreover, the works of Daniel Sztyber may be the biggest ever to come out of the North Carolina Sandhills.
This Polish-born artist has designed his own house near Lake Tillery, in the Woodrun community of western Montgomery County. He has sold paintings from Warsaw and Berlin to the major art centers of the United States. He lives for his art, taking the feelings inside of him and splashing them onto the campus with brilliant colors. And this writer has rarely seen a person more fired up, more enthusiastic about his paintings.
Sztyber’s reddish beard gives him a slight resemblance to Vincent Van Gogh, especially when Kirk Douglas portrayed the troubled Dutch painter in the 1956 film “Lust for Life.” But Van Gogh hardly sold a single painting while he was alive, while Sztyber has sold hundreds of his colorful and highly expressive oil and acrylic paintings across the globe.
Sztyber, 58, and his wife, Jola (pronounced YO-lah), immigrated to the United States in 1985, living first in Pensacola, Fla., then moving to Charlotte after a year. During their time in the States, Daniel has worked as a building contractor, exporting goods to Poland and owned several art galleries. In 1999, the Sztybers moved to Woodrun, where they now live with a terrier named Wolf. Wolf “is a local boy, born in Montgomery County,“ Sztyber says.
Now the Sztybers can really call North Carolina home. Their two sons, Gerard and Maciej, both live in this state, and Daniel’s three brothers all live in Charlotte.
Gerard Sztyber is a family practitioner living in Brevard. He and his wife, a native of Cuba named Minerva, have two daughters, Izabela and Maia. “I am in love with them,” Daniel says of his grandchildren.
Maciej Sztyber is a builder and musician who lives in Charlotte; he is still single.
Daniel’s brothers are Chris, a businessman; Bogdan, a stone fabricator and Adam, a jazz musician. Maciej’s works include a CD titled “Lullaby for You and Me,” for which he recorded and composed all eight tracks. Adam has a CD, too, titled “Adam Sztyber & New Orleans Quintet,” on which Adam plays guitar.
Daniel and Jola Sztyber live in a two-story home, consisting of spacious rooms in the European style. This includes a room with exercise equipment, a studio and a bathroom with a tub almost as big as a Jacuzzi in a health spa.
Sztyber is quick to mention he is not an architect. He describes the house as he once conceived as “just something I would like to put on paper, and have something according to my needs.”
Guests can see Daniel Sztyber’s paintings all over the home, including still lifes, landscapes and other scenes from nature. He uses brilliant colors that seem to jump off the canvases, beckoning the viewer to look upon them.
“Every year I have to work hard as a painter,” he says. “I work with the things inside of me, my connection with nature. I like nature.”
Sztyber describes his works as “a little differently than traditional painting,” he says. “I use vivid colors, a lot of light. I do not use that many details, just spots of light, like in my flowers.
“I leave the rest to you. You decide (what the painting means).”
“Whatever you do, you express something from the inside,” Sztyber continues. “You see something, you judge it. With art it’s the same way: You see something, you judge it with your own eyes.”
“Impressionism was good because it created a new point of view from the traditional ways, like (the use of) outdoor light,” Sztyber says.
He says his work may is “partially” impressionism. “The rest is like a peaceful nature, like a storm that has a tranquility to it.”
“Some people, when they need to express themselves, they do it by dancing, by partying,” Sztyber says. “I do it by painting.”
When he becomes really wrapped up in a painting, he says, “I am so into painting, it’s like your heart, not your hand, that’s painting.”
Only one of his paintings this writer saw depicted something not quite as beautiful as Sztyber’s countless flowers, still lifes, landscapes and other scenes from nature. He depicts the Chernobyl nuclear reaction disaster of the 1980s in a grim, haunting painting titled “Revelations”, which he completed in 1992. On one side of the canvas are smoke, flames, scorched earth as the smoke blows across a wide road that divides the nuclear plant in the Ukraine from a vast, tranquil forest.
The painting conveys a clearly apocalyptic message, as described in the Book of Revelations. The canvas says, “Revelation 8, 10-11,” the passage in the New Testament that Sztyber connects to the Chernobyl disaster. That passage describes a great star that will fall upon the earth, with the name “Wormwood”.
Sztyber points out that the Ukrainian word for wormwood is “Chernobyl”.
The infamous nuclear accident took place close to his birthplace. “I was born 150 to 200 miles from Chernobyl,” he said.
Sztyber’s subjects have featured a lot less doom and gloom since then. After he moved to Woodrun, he began painting landscapes of the woods around his home, and of Lake Tillery.
Sztyber does not like to paint scenes of too many other troublesome things in the world, such as the crisis in the Middle East. “You want to get away from the bad,“ he says. “The way you do it, is you experience nature.“
He described a painting that he did after the death of his mother. “When I look at this painting, I see her,” he says.
He showed this writer a painting of his godson at a pond of deep blue water, with some ducks. “I call this ‘Enlightenment.’ When you are quiet and you watch this, you become enlightened.”
Sztyber also told about a painting called “Waiting for Blues,” as in bluefish. He painted it out of his enjoyment of fishing. “I love to go fishing, because when you fish, it’s quiet,” he says.
He has exhibited his paintings at art expos in New York and San Francisco. In 2006 he plans to attend Art Miami, Fla.
He describes an experience he had visiting London that inspired him in his love of nature. He and Jola went to London in 1996, to visit Gerard, who was practicing medicine in Kingston. Gerard had been studying medicine at a school on the island of Montserrat, and left when the volcano on that island erupted.
“I went to London and I experienced something unbelievable,” Daniel Sztyber says. “For the first time in my life it was so beautiful. I discovered many gardens in London, where it’s usually so rainy and cold. When we came back to Charlotte, I started planting gardens.”
It seems Daniel Sztyber had visited England six times before, but on this particular visit he and Jola experienced what he described as the most beautiful sunshine of the beginning of summer there.
“Having then a rare occasion to admire London…they ran around the city like little children discovering the wonderful and fascinating flora,” says a written account of his experience.
“It was the flowers that enchanted him there. He had not noticed such beauty and variety of colors so closely before. He felt their scent and realized their fullness of life. He admired the harmony of the wild flowers growing amongst the man-made landscape. Such harmony is rare to find in the activity and relationships between people.”
Sztyber not only enjoys painting; he plays music sometimes, and has begun writing a book. He is also an avid film buff. He has a keyboard at his home, which he keeps around mostly for one of his granddaughters.
“I started writing a book, for trying to find the roots of my ancestors,” he says. “I started writing articles about my ancestors, and now I’m trying to put it all into a book. It’s just like a resume, or the summary of my life.”
Sztyber was born in 1947. His father, who passed away four years ago, taught him sketching when he was a kid, he says. Daniel has a photograph of his father and Jola together in his studio today; he says he still feels the presence of his father in this photograph.
In Poland, Sztyber studied under a professor named Rozycki, and received his Masters degree in 1971.
When he came to the States, Sztyber first took some courses in computers and art at junior college in Pensacola, Fla.
When Daniel and Jola Sztyber moved to Woodrun in the winter of 1999, “it was pretty scary, after so many years of living in the big cities,” Daniel says. “It’s like a jungle. No people.”
But in short time they became used to it. They found their neighbors were quite friendly, and he appreciates their hospitality and friendship. He says he would love to give something back to the community that it gave to him and Jola.
More on Sztyber’s work
“The overwhelming majority of his works are set in nature,” another written report of Sztyber’s life says. “His late projects and flower arrangements are superbly vivid, with fantastic colors and sharp contrasts. Deep shades of blues and purples often collide with the bright yellows and reds. The setting of his works are divided between the natural and man-made flora, with his earlier paintings representing adaptations of the forests and countryside of Poland….Some of the images reveal the picturesque side of North Carolina; on others one can see the interplay between man and nature.
“Daniel tries to express his own spiritual connection to the pure, untainted natural world around him. Certainly he gives the viewer a colorful alternative to the modern, urban, predominantly machine-run world we live in, an escape from the daily toils to the simpler and warmer world Daniel attempts to preserve and reveal that wild world, a source of his inspiration.
“In a way this is the artist’s philosophical premise, a modern romanticism of sorts, where the longing for the past, or his childhood spent in the countryside, coincides with the bigger area of the positive life force of nature. In a belief that nature has a healing and positive quality on our lives the painter exposes his own inner world as it flows onto canvas.”
Sztyber is a member of the Union of Polish Artists and Randolph Arts Guild in Asheboro. More information about him and his works can be seen on www.danielartstudio.com and www.artgalleryunlimited.com.
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Bill Lindau lives in Hamlet. A former reporter for the old Citizen News-Record of Aberdeen and The Post of Troy, he can be contacted at blindau52@yahoo.com or (910) 461-7804.

posted by Bill Lindau @ 10:37 PM