A concert hall. Watercolour and crayons by Tomasz Sitkowski, 1976.

Wrocław, 1976.

1 drawing : watercolour and crayons ; sheet 50.1 x 35 cm

Muszla konce[r]towa Tomasz Sitkowski 1975 [1975 amended to 1976] u Wrocław [Wrocław scored through]

Tomasz Sitkowski was born in 1949 with Down's Syndrome. He was not expected to survive his early years. However, after overcoming many hardships, his parents recognized the remarkable calming and beneficial effects of music on the young child, and began to take him to concerts. At the age of fourteen he began to draw. His theme, to be repeated obsessively over subsequent years, was the concert hall and its music, expressed through a dynamic use of colour. The architectural interiors pulsate and are alive with sound, which Tomasz actually experienced as colour (synaesthesia). He can only create his art whilst listening to his tape player. His love of music, thus reified, has become his main form of expression and communication with the outside world. In 1985 Tomasz Sitkowski's case history and art were discussed at an international conference on mental disablement in New York. His drawings are in the Ethnographic Museums of Radom and Wrocław and have been in over sixty exhibitions between 1968 and 2001. He is also included in Aleksander Jackowski's definitive book on Polish naive art. (Information from Henry Boxer, Richmond, Surrey)

The New York conference at which Tomasz Sitkowski's work was discussed may be: Mental retardation: research, education, and technology transfer, edited by Henryk M. Wisniewski and Donald A. Snider, New York, N.Y.: New York Academy of Sciences, 1986 (Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences ; v. 477. Proceedings of a workshop entitled Mental retardation and developmental disabilites, held 24-26 May 1985 in Staten Island, sponsored by the New York State Institute for Basic Research in Developmental Disabilities)--to be confirmed

Wellcome Collection 546556i

Copyright is held by the Wellcome Trust