Anton Brzezinski

Surrealist, Cubist, the great Anton Brzezinski, called "The Living Dali" and the "Polish Picasso" to many, is alive and still painting like a mad man. This tribe is for discussion and sharing knowledge, about this master artist and his paintings. Enjoy!

Bio:

The Polish-American artist Anton Brzezinski was born on July 10, 1946 in the Southern California town of Riverside in the United States. His father was a Polish American cabinetmaker with a penchant for precision. His mother was a beautiful lady who had been asked to test for motion pictures, and who was of aristocratic English stock, dating back to the middle ages. Most importantly, his grandmother, who raised Anton the boy, was an oil painter and illustrator. In 1912 she had sold a design to the American tobacco company.

As a small child, Anton slept in the room of this grandmother, who not only had her paintings on the wall, but an easel set up where she worked daily on her paintings. Thus as an infant he grew up familiar with the tools and motions of painting, and the smell of the oil paints and turpentine.

The friction created by class differences between the two sides of the family, the farmer-Carpenter father, and the mother of aristocratic history, were strong, but the union was a product of love, and the boy never felt unwanted. He was adored by his grandmother and aunts.

His only unpleasantness was his compulsory attendance at a parochial school. St. Thomas Catholic School. In those days the teachers, who were nuns, were very strict, punishing the children by hitting them on the hands with rulers, and it was required to kneel and pray for long periods. Even as a child Anton found it impossible to believe the unscientific religious dogmas, although at the same time he was fascinated by the church art and imagery of the Catholic church. However, he argued with the teachers and finally broke from Catholic teachings when he was a teenager, which made his family angry.

However, by the age of 14, his talent for drawing had brought him to the attention of a local business, which asked him to do cartoons on t-shirts. In addition, he was already making money by doing pencil portraits and selling the occasional watercolor painting.

High school was a more favorable experience. For one thing, it was in a public school system. Secondly, he had an art major. His most notable teacher was in lettering, Fred Bush, who was quite famous as the Hal Roach movie studios sign painter in the 1920's and 1930's. From him Anton learned many things about precision and brushstrokes. Even as a student, Anton was strongly attracted to modern art, particularly the movement known as Surrealism, which in contrast to abstract art, uses a representational style to produce symbolic and bizarre compositions. On his written test for graduation, Anton was asked to describe his ambitions, and he wrote: "I want to make realistic paintings of things that aren't."

When Anton was old enough to legally do so, he moved from his parents home to Hollywood, California. He was fascinated with movies and even considered being an actor. While trying to get any kind of work in a movie studio, he started his first real oil paintings in the apartment he rented. His first large painting, a surrealism entitled "The Voyeur" was sold to a movie studio to be used in a Peter Fonda film, a popular actor of the day. Then, in 1967 he appeared on a half hour nationally syndicated television talk show, "The Joe Pyne Show," bringing paintings with him and showing them to the camera.

For a brief time he traveled to the northern city of San Francisco, and decorated stores in the controversial Haight Ashbury. One of these paintings appeared in color in the March 18, 1968 Paris Match Magazine, the largest circulation magazine in France, his first international press.

But discontent with the lifestyle of the West coast, he decided to travel, which brought him to New Orleans in 1969. In this old central southern city on the Mississippi river, he found an ambiance which agreed with him. Importantly, it was a very cultural city, a heritage from the French and Spanish who had built it, with a large art colony centered in the French Quarter area. From the older painters, Anton learned many techniques of mixing and applying paints. Among these teachers was the pastel artist William Mahood, who had done artwork for the producer Walt Disney for ten years. Soon, Anton and Mahood were working in a small studio together, which opened on the street near the square. They did pastel portraits. Over the years, Anton recalled he did over 1,500 pastel portraits. At this time, a photograph of Anton painting on the street appeared in the prestigious National Geographic magazine. He was interviewed by National Enquirer, and a short video biography showing him painting a surrealism was produced for PBS, by WYES 12 television in New Orleans.

At the same time, Antons' ambitions were strong enough that he continued to study serious painting by seeking out very old books, some 200 years old, in the archives of libraries, on the subject of painting. It was possible to check out or at least copy the original published writings of important historical artists; Thomas Sully, Joshua Reynolds, and Messionier, and translations of old Italian masters like Leonardo da Vinci. In these books the craft of mixing and applying paint in the classical manner was explained, and Anton learned everything he could.

Soon, it was important for him to study the classical paintings first hand. Because of their worth, they are usually owned only by the largest museums. He began to travel for long stays in cities like Boston and New York city, where he could study first hand paintings by masters like Rembrandt and Reuben's. Then in 1976, when he was about to turn 30 years old, he flew to Europe, where he painted months at a time in many of the major capitals. He paid his way as a painter, and worked in Paris, London, Amsterdam and Rome, so he could be close to the great museums and go through them, sometimes daily, to copy and make detailed notes from his favorite paintings. He appeared painting on television at the Acropolis in Athens, Greece.

He began to be collected by Europeans who noticed his Surrealisms, particularly Giovanni Barbagelata, the architect for the Bank of Rome, and David Braitman, an art dealer, collector and an adviser to the modern art museums of Holland.

In 1987, he was honored to be included in a prestigious exhibition given in Washington, D.C. by the Federal Reserve system.

He now made the friendship of the imminent art dealer Kurt Schon, who had been featured in a two page spread in Business Week for selling thirty million dollars worth of paintings to Dominique de Minil, a Texas heiress who had Dali's and other Surrealisms in her collection. Anton made the friendship of Jaque Ferrer-Forte, current count of Ferrera Spain, importantly a close acquaintance of Salvador Dali, the aging master who at that time was ailing and close to death. Anton's efforts to meet Dali had been spurred by meeting Dali's photographer Marc Delacroix in New York. Anton had been to Dalis' home and studio in Cadaques Spain. Now, through Ferrer-Forte, Anton received direct news of each new tragedy in the final days of the aging painter's life; this painter who was so influential to him, and through Forte, Anton was able to send Dali gifts and letters.

Anton himself was almost as eccentric as his Spanish idol.

Interested since childhood by meditation and Eastern religions, Anton was a strange balance between a mystical and scientific person. Although he personally experienced several cathartic visions, he always explains them in rational terms. It is this ability to understand visionary phenomena, in reasonable terms, which contributes to his appeal. Although he has a marketable and zany style, one senses that the person is deeply intelligent and well grounded, with his feet firmly on "terra firma."

It was in the late 1990s and the advent of the Internet that Anton Brzezinki began to be known to a larger audience. This eccentric artist, who wears jackets decorated with purple eyes and paints in the style of Salvador Dali, began to appear on web pages and be accessible in the homes of millions of people. His sense of humor appears in everything he writes, and even his car, a 1948 Austin Princess limo, is painted white with Purple Eyes.

Although on the slightest examination, he is an entirely different person; Anton Brzezinski eases the sense of loss caused by the death of Dali by filling some need the public has for an eccentric but intelligent artist who is entertaining as well as an excellent painter of strange subjects. Since that time, in addition to his exhibits in galleries, he has sold over a hundred thousand dollars of art on the internet. Sometimes finishing up to a hundred paintings a year.

In 1999, he was featured in a show in Washington DC by the Fraser gallery: "Homage to Dali." His painting of the same name received press in the Washington Post, the Washington Times, and the Dallas Morning News.

Currently, Anton lives and paints all over the world.