Artist Three: Julian Stanczak

Julian Stanczak, born in Poland in 1928, is now living in Ohio and is seen as an American painter and printmaker.  During World War II Stanczak was put in a Siberian labor camp, while there he permanently lost the use of his right hand, he was right handed.  In 1942 he escaped the labor camp and joined the Polish army-in-exile in Persia, once he deserted the army he lived in a Polish refugee camp in Uganda.  While at the refugee camp he learned to write and more importantly to paint left-handed.  He moved to the United States in 1950 and moved to Ohio.  He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1954, after that he studied at the School of Arts and Architecture at Yale University.  While at Yale, Stanczak studied under Josef Albers and Conrad Marca-Relli, and in 1956 he received his Master of Fine Arts.  In 1964 Julian Stanczak had his first major show in New York at the Martha Jackson Gallery.  His show, Julian Stanczak: Optical Paintings, was when the are movement, Op Art, was coined.    Through his time with Albers, Stanczak uses the structures of color along with repeating forms and geometric structures.  More recently he has been creating large-scale work that consists of square panels on which he looks at variations of hue and chroma in color modulations.  Julian Stanczak’s work is an amazing combination of color and line play.  They are not always easy on the eyes because the interactions between the different colors, hues, and chromas, as well as the position of the forms, makes his art play with the eyes of the viewer.  All of this makes his art so much more visually interesting.