Paintings by Justyna Kopania

Justyna Kopania is a contemporary Polish painter known for her highly textured, atmospheric oil paintings, primarily focusing on seascapes, ships, and emotional landscapes.

Her work is distinguished by a powerful sense of mood, movement, and a unique application of paint.

Artistic Style and Technique

• Medium and Technique: Kopania works mainly with oil paint on large canvases. She is famous for her heavy, structural application of paint using the impasto technique, often employing a palette knife instead of just brushes. This results in thick layers of paint that create a three-dimensional relief on the canvas, emphasizing the raw emotion and energy of the scene.

• Genre and Subjects:

  • She is most widely recognized for her dramatic marine paintings (seascapes, boats, and old sailing ships). Her depiction of ships struggling against stormy seas, or shrouded in thick mist, is a recurring and captivating theme.

  • She also explores a variety of other subjects, including landscapes, cityscapes, and portraits, often infused with the same expressive texture.

• Aesthetics: Her style blends elements of Impressionism and Expressionism. She prioritizes expressing emotion and a subjective experience of reality over photographic likeness. She often uses a restricted, moody color palette, particularly for her seascapes, to enhance the feeling of mist, rain, and powerful atmosphere.

Inspiration and Vision

• The Sea and Freedom: Kopania frequently cites the ocean as a major inspiration, associating the boundless space and raw power of the sea with the concept of freedom.

• Emotion and Time: She views painting not as a reflection of reality, but as a transformation of reality shaped by emotion. She strives to "capture time" in her paintings—a snippet of a second—and focuses on the internal and external complexities of "The Man" as a main topic in her wider work.

• Perspective: In her words, she tries to show the "world" from an "unusual, remote" perspective, suggesting that a unique viewpoint can reveal a richer and more colorful reality than we perceive every day.