Anna Dumicz’s paintings are made of people. Nudes, portraits, faces looking out at the viewer or figures idling in their free time. Attractive people, often with a wistful stare in their eyes, melancholic but striking, making you feel they are singling you out from the crowd. Her figures are engaged in seemingly mundane activities, absorbed in their personal world which the artist manages to penetrate. Such as the boy reading in silence, the two lovers on a bed, a woman sitting at a kitchen table, and a boy asleep in his clothes curled up on the settee. Dumicz’s images are soaked in a timid quietness that oozes poetry, almost like looking through teary eyes.

Anna is Polish and has been living in Malta for over a year and a half. She studied art and sculpture at the I. Riepin Academy of Fine Arts in St Petersburg and at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, and exhibited her work in various important galleries abroad. According to Fr Marius Zerafa, ex-director of museums and a professor of History of Art, “her sure hand, her sense of composition, her refined taste and her obvious understanding and appreciation of the great art of the past show in all her works – in the line drawings, in her powerful portraits, in her lovely nudes, even in her experiments in abstraction. Her study of sculpture must have strengthened her rendering of the human form. All this makes her the accomplished artist that she undoubtedly is.”

Anna was first drawn to Malta when she was here on holiday. “I was delighted by the beauty of the islands, their colours and light, and the harmony between history and art,” she says. Recently, she exhibited her works on board The Black Pearl, a ship cum restaurant in Ta’ Xbiex, where she was inspired by the originality of the space. “I thought the hall of an old ship was an innovative place to exhibit my work. I shared the space with Maltese artist Joe Barbara. I exhibited some ink sketches, oil paintings and three nude drawings made with sepia and pastels.”

Anna is very confident and technically accomplished when it comes to painting the human figure. Her nudes as well as clothed figures are anatomically accurate yet still expressive. “The human figure and portrait is more challenging than any other subject,” she explains, “It never bores me.” Anna is also particularly in love with the quality of the light in Malta. Warm and bright, the strong Mediterranean sunlight fascinates the artist, imbuing her paintings with an air of vitality. “I think the light here is incredible,” she exclaims, “in fact now I draw and paint more landscapes than before.” Her influences include masters ranging from Rubens, Velázquez, Vermeer, Manet, Ingres and Tiziano to El Greco, Veronese, Balthus, Egon Schiele and Francis Bacon. She is at her peak when “painting without disturbance”. For her, art is “sometimes pleasure and sometimes torture. Painting is a search for the truth and cosmic harmony,” she explains, “which is not necessarily the conventional idea of beauty but possibly beauty existent in oppositions - good and evil, darkness and light. You cannot see light without shadow.” This contrasting dualism is reflected in her work, that appears placid yet at the same time turbulent. The stillness frozen in her paintings feels at times so suppressed that it seems to be teeming with underlying yearning and impatience.

“I find the local art scene interesting and very different from Poland,” Anna comments. Malta with its harmoniously coexisting landscape, architecture and art creates a good climate for painters, according to the artist. Anna describes her own work as “realistic, contemporary painting rooted in the past”. She is inspired by the great painters from the past, travelling, interesting faces and incidents from her life. Her paintings are indeed an interesting mixture of contemporary settings and characters portrayed in a classic, traditional style that seasons them in an exquisite flavour of the past. Anna does not identify her art with more contemporary forms such as happenings and art installations. “I am not an academic in that sense. But if you understand an academic artist to be someone with solid technique and rooted in tradition, I believe that, yes, that I am.”

Anna Dumicz’s perceptive rendition of the human subject is distinctive and demands attention. Her portraits’ longing stares and tense silence are all throbbing with a deep, intense energy that one does not commonly come by. The different characters and situations portrayed in the paintings are united through a sense of rigorous soul searching that pervades the mood of the paintings and seems to be the artist’s very own.