Yarek Godfrey

Biography

Yarek Godfrey (real name Jaroslaw Pawel Nowicki) (1957 – 2014) was a Polish artist of French, British and Austrian origins). Living and working between Paris & New York. The sensual and mysterious women painted by Yarek Godfrey evolve in a timeless universe in soft and moderate tones. Of his studies of drawing, all the techniques of painting, the scenography also, then his journeys in Rome, Naples or Florence, Yarek Godfrey kept a deep taste for the fresco and masters of the Renaissance.
In 1982 he graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow and the Studies for Stage Costume design for theater in Cracow.
In 1983 he moved to Paris, where he lived until his death in 2014. Godfrey received numerous awards for his work (among others, the Gold Medal of the XXXVIII Salon of Young Artists, Grand Palais, Paris, 1987; Grand Prix of the XXVI International Art Salon Côte d’Azur, Cannes, 1990).
He presented his work at numerous group and individual exhibitions, primarily in the United States and France, but also in Belgium, Monaco, or Italy.
He died tragically on March 28th, 2014.

Artist Statement

…LEAVING A TRACE…
“All was already told, but as nobody listening, we always have to start over again.”
-Andre Gide

I’m not quite sure we can talk about painting or music. This is a domain of different senses which words can’t describe that’s why I’m using often the colors without names to translate the unknown sounds of my soul. I’ve named this process: “never-ending story” so if I stop working on the painting that’s because someone tells me inside: “that’s it” – and I never know why…For more information, please contact my Guardian Angel…

The almost primitive, and for me natural need to express the mix of joy, anguish, and solitude is always emotional and magic like an initiation rite. It’s the way to communicate without words and to share profound feelings with the risk to reveal too much… to become weak in the fact of exposing oneself… So, fragile… The desire and the power to create give birth to images composed of my memories, dreams, and hopes.

A message to pass along? Let’s rather say: another mark of the hand-printed on the wall of the natural cave as if to say: “I was here”…

We always return to the source. Of course, 10 years of classical training at the Art College and later at the Academy of Fine Arts, makes a great experience. But to find one’s own voice it is necessary to create a private base soon after. Then theatre becomes a real platform of creation: always on a large scale and with fantastic lights; it is like in a life where roles are acted out; true and false at the same time.
The big spectacle of illusion where the background or costumes can change the character of the actors. Higher, like powerful images of cathedrals with their spiritual silences. The soul… the soul so desired and essential, closely tied to creation.

Stronger, like ruins of Pompeii where so theatrical silence of contemplation adds to the vision of drama. The perfect place to meditate, to be reborn…Bigger, like the Grand Canyon; an enormous natural cathedral upside-down where one is trying to perceive the human being moved to tears. In this place everything comes together; caverns, temples, and ruins. There, one leaves the Earth and what is left is pure creation. The earth does not need mankind. Emotions, emotions…My birth planet, Mars remains a project for the future.

“Let’s be reasonable – let’s ask for impossible”

“Art is the sex of the imagination”