Untitled (bird)

Ludwik Holesz worked most of his life as a miner in the Moszczenica mine. During work breaks, he studied plants fossilized in coal. They prompted him to search for answers to the questions of where the coal came from and what the landscape looked like at the time when these plants were still swaying in the wind.

320 million years ago, the area of ​​today's Silesia was covered by a prehistoric forest with plants reaching tens of meters, huge insects and strange amphibians. The idea of ​​this world fascinated Holesz and inspired many of his paintings full of lush vegetation and animals from the Jurassic period.

Holesz started painting as a self-taught artist after his wife Agnieszka bought a painting from a door-to-door salesman. He worked with a simple wooden plate, window paints and soot, which he mixed into the colors to obtain different shades of gray. He made the brush out of pig hair from a farmer neighbor. In addition to various prehistoric visions, he also tried to paint life in space and on alien planets.

lab.SNG ● Szymon Kamczyk: Zaczynał pędzlem ze świńskich włosów. Nowiny.pl (2014).