...When Michał Twerd, an art teacher and talented painter in one, opened the exhibition “Autumn Encounters with Colour” at the Second General Secondary School, acting as a guide to the world of beauty and art in the presence of numerous secondary-school students and outside guests, I could not resist a wave of memories from several decades ago. For one short holiday month in 1962, Bolesławiec was the nationwide centre for art education for teachers from Lower Silesia. The same Mr Twerd lectured on art history, taught composition, led courses in form and colour, and taught lettering, poster design and the design of spatial forms. The carefully selected quartet of lecturers also included visual artist Izabela Zdrzałka, a long-serving teacher at the Teacher Training College, Zofia Łysoń and the undersigned. We were united not only by our shared profession, passion for painting or drive towards pedagogical innovation and originality. We also shared ordinary human feelings: collegiality, friendship, sympathy and respect. Values that are exceedingly rare in the complicated modern world.
Who still remembers that pioneering educational event today? “Plastyka w Szkole”, a specialist methodological periodical published by the ministry, wrote in an editorial comment: “The course in Bolesławiec was the only regional art course organised during the 1962 holidays. Given the universally felt shortage of teachers to conduct art education, this fact is the most surprising!” Here are a few more brief quotations from the same monthly publication:
“The location of the course in Bolesławiec was not a matter of chance. This historic town of 25,000, whose history reaches back to the Piast era, has been painstakingly reconstructed in its historic section and now enchants with the architectural forms of numerous relics of the past, the pastel colours of its renovated tenement houses, the monumental silhouettes of its churches and town hall, as well as other magnificent buildings with richly sculpted portals, gates and defensive walls. The picturesque ribbon of the Bóbr, the expansive foothill landscape and, finally, the proximity of the Karkonosze Mountains—all this creates favourable conditions for working outdoors. Also significant is the existence at the Jan Matejko School of a perfectly equipped painting studio, a huge assembly hall suitable for organising exhibitions and, finally, modern audiovisual equipment that made it possible to provide an illustrative introduction to the issues of art history. The decisive factor was the concentration in the old town on the Bóbr of a fairly large and active group of artists cooperating with ‘Ceramika Artystyczna’ (a CPLiA institution), as well as many experienced teacher-theorists and practitioners who, after completing specialist teacher-training colleges in Katowice, Opole and Zielona Góra, engage in drawing and painting and have already amassed an impressive artistic output over many years of searching.”
That is now history... From the pioneering era, only Michał Twerd remains an active professional teacher. He was formerly associated with the Jan Matejko School, later with the Teacher Training College and today with the Second General Secondary School. He has also remained faithful to his passion for painting, developed his talent and produced hundreds of paintings, which he rarely exhibits, preferring instead to collect them with refined connoisseurship. Today this is a true treasury of art, a veritable oasis of beauty, a surprisingly rich and mature collection, overwhelming in its beauty and impressive in its variety of subjects and mastery of technique. Works of art worthy of museums and the greatest sanctuaries: they contrast subtle, delicate patches of watercolour with the strong outlines of autonomous drawing, crying out in a decisive colour tonality across oil-covered surfaces. There is something here of romantic poetry, epic nostalgia and the cold mood of a day, but also the sadness of transience, surprisingly juxtaposed with the beauty of an expansive landscape. These are paintings created from the heart by a sensitive artist—professional, balanced, carefully considered in composition and innovative in their admiration for the beauty of the world: authentic, difficult to name, subjective in experience; a concentrated talent of the purest kind, a gift bestowed by the gods’ chosen one, which Mr Twerd shared with the audience without words...
In the successive “Autumn Encounters with Colour” exhibitions he organised, the artist allocated little space to himself: he showed only one large abstract painting with multicoloured Cubist accents, without a narrative subject or associations with objects, but with a balanced composition and a colouristic expression attacking the viewer’s subconscious. A distinctive, paradoxical artistic credo, a higher stage of creative initiation, the entire scale of experiences enclosed in perfect form. A bold challenge to the commonly accepted canons of realistic, superficial and traditional creation, a distinctive silent cry. This is art for professionals, innovative and fresh, growing out of the pain of the transformation in worldview at the end of the century, reaching into the future just as the vibrant beauty captured on the canvases of the French Impressionists did.
A participant in many plein-air workshops, a tireless seeker of the beauty of the world and the depth of life through brush and palette, a teacher through and through, Michał Twerd organised at his own secondary school an exhibition displaying works primarily by his colleagues. The participants were mainly teacher-artists from Zgorzelec: Krystyna Adler, Tomasz Brudniak, Elżbieta Borkowska-Korniak and Stanisław Witek, as well as Ludwika Rajkohonberger from Jelenia Góra and Leonard Kobziarz from Zielona Góra. The local community of artist-teachers was represented by Wiesław Goryczka, Lesław Kasprzycki and the frequently quoted Michał Twerd. The dominant theme of the exhibition was not limited to the colours of the autumn landscape. It also included successful studies of still life, the human figure and architectural fragments. Exceptional colour sensitivity, expressiveness or the toning down of colours, and the apt transposition of the mood of this season onto canvas or paper testify to the maturity of the artists’ craft and to the disappearance of the notion of amateur painting in our times. Either one has talent, that “divine spark”, or one simply does not, and no academies or universities can help here: art is governed by separate laws, and these people shone with talent of the purest kind, as their works prove. One can congratulate them on their achievements, the opening and the exhibition, and appeal for similar initiatives in other schools.