Big Cloud, Small World, 2026

Lukasz Olek   Emerging artists

"Big Cloud, Small World" belongs to my ongoing series of abstract landscape paintings, in which real places, journeys and memories are reduced to their essential elements: colour, light, texture and rhythm.

The painting evokes a winter landscape seen through fog — a frozen lake, snow-covered ground and a distant shoreline almost disappearing beneath a vast, heavy sky. The horizon is still there, but its boundaries have become uncertain. Water, ice, land and cloud begin to merge into one another.

This ambiguity lies at the heart of the series. My method originated from the idea of taking an extremely narrow fragment of a landscape image and stretching it across the entire canvas. What remains is a simplified structure of horizontal fields: traces of sky, forest, water or earth. The landscape approaches abstraction without completely abandoning its origin.

In "Big Cloud, Small World", cool greys, muted browns and a narrow trace of deep blue create an almost monochromatic winter atmosphere. Numerous layers of acrylic paint are applied, scraped and partially removed, allowing earlier colours and marks to emerge through the surface. Scratches, abrasions and vertical traces interrupt the apparent calm and make the textured painting change when viewed from different distances.

My landscapes are connected not only with places but also with music. Their titles refer to songs associated with particular journeys, memories or emotional states. Together they form a kind of sonic diary — a private connection between landscape, sound and memory.

"Big Cloud, Small World" exists somewhere between contemporary abstract art and landscape painting: not a depiction of one specific lake or winter morning, but the memory of being there.