There is a saying in the art world that "if you don't go crazy, you can't live", which refers to a kind of professionalism, because every artist has a different understanding of the world.
They are romantic and beautiful, but also bizarre, and there is an artist in Poland who has a chilling style of painting. He suffered a 10-minute cardiac arrest in a car accident, and after his resurrection, not only did he not suffer any brain damage, but his painting style was also unique.
The painter claims that he is not creating, but only describing what he sees after death, that is, the world of hell......
The Polish man has a strange and heavy painting style, and is known as a master of dark art
The name Bexinski is unfamiliar to most people, but gamers will know that Scorn is a biopunk survival adventure game with an extremely eerie art style that was first released in 2022.
Nominated for Best Art Direction at the Game Awards, the single-player video game was developed by two major companies and was inspired by the Polish master of dark painting, Zisław Beksinski.
There are not many artists in the art field who are inspired by some dark elements, such as skeletons and crosses, and the well-known British fashion master Alexander McQueen has led the trend style of several generations with skull design elements.
The Hollywood luxury brand "Croixin" founded by Richard Stark uses the cross as the logo and brand element of the whole series of products, and the design style of John Galliano, known as the "Pirate Lord", is also very outstanding......
These highly individual masters of art are bowed to in front of Bexsinski, and their designs are at best eye-catching, and Beksinski's paintings exude a chilling decadence from the inside out.
In his works, you can even think of the description of Lion Camel Ridge in "Journey to the West", which can be described in eight words in the original book: skeletons are like mountains, and bones are like forests.
Beksinski's paintings often present scenes like purgatory on earth, which can make the scalp tingle.
One of the artist's favorite pigments was called Prussian land, which had a deep blue color and was often used in blue and white porcelain. The raw material from Prussialand is called hydrogen cyanide, and this ingredient is often found in paints and coatings.
During World War II, the Nawrislav army used this chemical to make poison gas to kill Jews, which is why the walls of the gas chambers in Auschwitz are now blue.
The strange style of painting and this peculiar raw material created Becksinski's dark style works made him unique in the field of art, but it was also quite controversial.
The desolate landscapes of Silent Hill, the faces of the characters distorted to the abstract, the branches of the trees about to fall in the dusk, and the group portraits of the characters with their mouths open and their teeth bared but without facial features all appear in Becksinski's paintings.
Even optimistic and cheerful people will have a kind of sadness from the inside out when they see his paintings, and the reason why this painter has such a strange painting style is also related to his experience.
After a 10-minute cardiac arrest in a car accident and waking up claiming to have seen hell, Beksinski has since created a series of chilling paintings.
Born in Poland, he is a top student in the Department of Architecture, and loves painting and creating art
On February 24, 1929, Beksinski was born in Sanok, a small county town on the banks of the San River in the Carpathian province of southern Poland.
When he was a child, he was no different from other boys, and he liked to play and run outdoors with his friends in his beautiful hometown, but he didn't expect this peaceful life to last only 10 years.
With the blitzkrieg of Nazi Germany in Poland, innocent people were drawn into the war, and the brutality of the Nazis reached Beeczynski's ears, and people around him talked about gas chambers, mass graves, and massacres......
For the first time, he found himself so close to death and hell that he could no longer go to school because of the war, and he and his family were constantly moving from place to place for their lives.
After the end of World War II, Beksinski was able to return to school to continue his studies, moving from his hometown to Krakow, Poland's second-largest city, to study architecture at a university.
In 1955, after graduating from university, Bexsinski returned to his hometown of Sarnock to work as a construction supervisor at a local construction site.
After a brutal war, many buildings in Poland were razed to rubble, and reconstruction work is in full swing.
The construction industry he worked in was very promising and his income was reasonable, but this high-achieving architecture graduate was more interested in sculpture and painting, and soon gave up his promising career and resolutely changed careers.
With no formal art education, Beksinski began his artistic life with a wild imagination.
Instead of using traditional wood or stone slabs, he uses materials such as cement, metal, and wires to present his imaginary world.
At the age of 26, his initial painting style showed a maverick style, which was incompatible with the mainstream painting genre of the time, and his creative inspiration basically came from his childhood experience and architectural life.
The cold metallic color and the straight lines like reinforced concrete are the most important elements of Beksinski's paintings, forming the first stage of the creative style, the paintings are full of dark style but not too out of line, and are easily accepted by some people.
What really sparked the shift in Beksinski's style was a bizarre car accident that led to more corpses, skeletons, and other elements in the painting, which had never been seen in real life.
The exaggerated art style has also caused great controversy, with some questioning Bexinski's paintings as mere means of attracting attention and sensationalism.
But he shared a story of his own experience to fight back against these people, that is, the car accident and what happened afterward.
The artist suffered a bizarre car accident and came back to life, and his painting style changed dramatically
At the age of 29, Bexinski was hit by a car, and he was on his way home when suddenly a shrill car horn sounded from a distance, and he was plunged into darkness after hearing a violent collision.
Paramedics soon arrived at the scene and nervously resuscitated him, finding that the injured person's heart had stopped beating and he had apparently lost his vital signs.
Soon after, he was taken to the hospital, where Bexsinski's parents waited outside the operating room and nearly collapsed when they learned that their son's heart had stopped.
Medical staff are also nervous and are making last-ditch efforts to help the injured get their hearts back to beat. A long time passed, and Beksinski did not regain spontaneous breathing, and the heartbeat was still not detectable.
There is a "golden 4 minutes" in medicine, which means that if the cardiac arrest lasts for more than 4 minutes, the human brain is likely to be irreversibly damaged, and even if it is rescued, it may be a vegetative person.
If the cardiac arrest lasted more than 10 minutes, there was little hope of resuscitation, and the medical staff decided to try again, and after another 4 minutes, the injured person still did not respond.
The paramedics decided to try one last time, and several nurses performed relay compressions to help Beksinski get his heart back in action.
Thanks to the efforts of the paramedics, a miracle finally occurred, and after 10 minutes of cardiac arrest, Beksinski was resuscitated. What is even more surprising is that when he opened his eyes, his mind was very clear, and the doctor confirmed that the injured person's brain was not damaged.
Soon after Beksinski recovered and was discharged from the hospital, his parents and friends found him more passionate about painting and his style more and more bizarre. He told those around him:
His own soul had been to another place in the ten minutes of cardiac arrest, and now that it was awake, it was necessary to record all these scenes.
In the early 60s, Beksinski was already well-known in the Polish art world and had a loyal following.
In 1964, he held his first exhibition in Warsaw, and his paintings were well received, with many art critics calling this period a style of painting "utopian realism".
The success of this exhibition greatly stimulated Beksinski's creative enthusiasm, and in the following ten years he created many whimsical works, and he was called "the master of Polish contemporary art".
Bexinski had a business-minded friend who popularized his paintings to France, Western Europe, the United States and Japan, which was also a great success.
In the 80s, Bexsinski's career was transformed again, and his paintings during this period were almost always based on monuments and sculptures, and still used a depressing color palette.
Although the style has changed, the visual impact is still very strong, and the fame is known all over the world.
Beksinski's life was full of ups and downs compared to his career success, with his wife dying in 1998 and his son, Thomas, a radio broadcaster who worked as a music critic and film translator in his spare time, and was as artistically talented as his father.
On Christmas Eve, the year after his wife's death, Beksinski found his son having committed suicide at home, and in just one year, his relatives had left one by one, and he had no intention of creating.
In 2005, Beksinski was found covered in blood and died in his home, and a forensic autopsy revealed that the deceased had 17 stab wounds. Local police arrested the suspect, Kubeck, who was a classmate of Thomas's.
Why did he kill Beksinski? The reason is that Kubeck had borrowed money from the other party and was refused, so he held a grudge and joined forces with another accomplice to kill the artist.
The court found Kubek guilty of murder and sentenced him to 25 years in prison, and another accomplice was sentenced to 5 years in prison.
Today, there is an art gallery in Sanok, Poland, dedicated to Beksinski, which was inaugurated in 2006 and houses 170 paintings by the artist, making it one of the most popular tourist destinations in the region.
Overall, although Beksinski is dead, his artistic style still influences the subculture. What do you think differently about this?
Resources:
Baidu Encyclopedia: https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E6%B5%8E%E6%96%AF%E7%93%A6%E5%A4%AB%C2%B7%E8%B4%9D%E5%85%8B%E8%BE%9B%E6%96%AF%E5%9F%BA/7796237?fr=ge_ala
CNKI: https://kns.cnki.net/kcms2/article/abstract?v=7qHjwMDcsG2NmVlJEXHESj7PmRtw3Y-7p6dlmZduVJOhPp95LfAEb9pf06PmUKsYvEAU_ux4Vd7GAZNTtWZNM4j6d2_mswXe9qHdpjhDXpl-V56mXqnpvr7FNBgj_vY71mc6sveHr9T0tIoipXtcbw==&uniplatform=NZKPT&language=CHS