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Anton Brzezinski, a surrealist artist who has traveled the world, recently moved to Bland after struggling to find a permanent home since he had to flee New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005. Photo by Jeffrey Simmons

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Eye on an artist

By NATE HUBBARD/Staff

Hollywood, New York, Rome.
Amsterdam, New Orleans, Hawaii.
Bland?
The rural hamlet may look out of place in the itinerary of your average globe-trotting artist, but then again Anton Brzezinski – even by art world standards – isn’t your typical type of fellow.
Brzezinski, who goes by monikers such as “The Living Dalí” and “The Polish Picasso,” more than meets the definition of an eccentric artist.
And how he arrived in Bland is quite a tale.
Blown Around
It all started with a snail.
Kenneth Prosch, a Bland County resident and art collector, was surfing the Internet last fall when he found a painting that caught his eye.
The untitled surrealist work by Brzezinski, now 62, happened to feature a snail, one of Prosch’s favorite creatures.
“I love his use of color, that’s what really struck me,” Prosch said.
The surrealist style, characterized by expressions of the subconscious and abnormal imagery, was made famous by 20th-century Spanish artist Salvador Dalí, and Brzezinski picked up his nickname by producing many Dalíesque creations.
Prosch made a bid on the snail image, got the painting and soon after started an online dialogue with the California-born artist of Polish heritage.
The buyer and the artist hit it off and began corresponding nearly every day, with Prosch soon finding out that Brzezinski had been struggling to find a place to work and live since Hurricane Katrina displaced him from New Orleans in 2005.
Brzezinski said he left New Orleans in a hurry when it came time to evacuate before the hurricane. He eventually safely made it to his daughter’s house in Texas, but when he returned to New Orleans a few months after the storm he found his home looted and his art supplies gone.
The artist said he made the best of the situation, using his Federal Emergency Management Agency check to try to reinvigorate himself by painting in Hawaii.
But he eventually found himself back in Texas, in poor health due to a leg infection and in cramped quarters not conducive to artistic expression.
Prosch, who recently closed down his small Valley View Retreat bed and breakfast venture at his Bland home, had extra room and offered to let Brzezinski move in.
“My wife [Nancy] and I are Christian people and he seemed to be in a dilemma,” said Prosch, who now owns five of Brzezinski’s paintings. “I liked his art and I figured, well, this is something I can do to help somebody.”
After spending a few weeks working on the logistics of the arrangement, the nomadic artist finally arrived in Bland early this summer.
“When I can withdraw, I can create better,” Brzezinski said. “Ken convinced me it would be a great retreat, it would be peaceful here and I could be creative.”
Calculated Craziness
Brzezinski knows he might come across as a little bizarre; in fact it’s an image he embraces.
During an interview Thursday, the mustachioed Brzezinski sported his trademark white suit coat, personally festooned with hand-painted purple eyes, and a matching purple bow tie.
As he showed off some of the paintings he’s created since he started working in his makeshift studio in Prosch’s home, Brzezinski also cradled his pet Chihuahua, Chloe, looking like some sort of twisted Paris Hilton doppelganger.
“People like to buy something from somebody that’s a little bit of a personality,” Brzezinski explained.
The artist admitted, though, that his everyday persona is toned down from the character he has created for the media and his audience.
“Can you imagine me going down to the grocery store in Bland wearing this?” he said, indicating his eye-catching getup.
“I am a little kooky and strange,” he added. “[But] I’m actually much saner than my public image that I present.”
Beyond his public appearances and photo-ops in the suit coat, Brzezinski has cultivated his character across a variety of mediums.
In March 2005, a few months before Katrina hit, Brzezinski published a surrealist autobiography titled “False Memories” under the premise of a fictionalized French writer coming to America to chronicle Brzezinski’s life story.
He is working on his second book, a sequel of sorts that will detail his post-Katrina life and his visions of the future, and also a feature-length movie, “Adventures of the Living Dalí,” that he hopes to sell on DVD.
Although Brzezinski said he sees Bland as his home base for the foreseeable future, he also has a trip to Japan planned to try to reach a new market.
Piggybacking on the country’s fascination with anime, a Japanese animation style, Brzezinski has plans to create a cartoon caricature of his oddball artist persona.
Serious Work
Beyond his eccentricities, Brzezinski is serious about his work.
In preparation for his forthcoming Japan trip, the painter has doubled as a language scholar for the past few months as he spends three to four hours a day trying to learn Japanese.
During his world travels, Brzezinski said he’s picked up a number of languages, although without speaking most of them every day he’s lost some of his skills.
“I speak Spanish rather fluently and French rather badly,” he said.
Brzezinski also is dedicated to his craft, spending hours a day painting and working to sell his wares.
In his long career, which began in earnest around age 19, Brzezinski has sold hundreds of paintings, with larger originals often selling for upward of $1,000 and his priciest creation selling for $3,500.
At Prosch’s urging, Brzezinski completed a grandiose 38-by-50 inch oil painting called “Anton’s Inferno” earlier this year, which he hopes to sell for $6,000.
The intricate painting (which has an accompanying book by the same name as a companion to the work) is Brzezinski’s interpretation of hell, playing off the 14th-century literary work “Dante’s Inferno.”
Brzezinski’s guide through hell in his inferno version is author William Burroughs, who Brzezinski said was his neighbor (along with pop artist Andy Warhol) in New York.
Brzezinski also has received critical acclaim for his work, including inclusion in the “Salvador Dalí: A Modern Homage to a Modern Icon” exhibit at the Georgetown Fraser Gallery in the Washington, D.C., area in 1999.
The show received press in the Washington Post and a photo of Brzezinski wearing one of his eye-covered jacket incarnations also appeared in a section of the Dallas Morning News.
Envisioning Success
Brzezinski points to two life-altering visions as the driving forces behind much of his career.
The first, which he said occurred when he was just starting out his artistic journey as teenager, involved an angelic figure emerging from the ceiling as he rested on the carpet in his mother’s house.
As the angel materialized, Brzezinski said a ray of light shot from one of the figure’s fingers and suddenly he began to see visions of paintings floating in the air.
“I’ve since come to believe that the only important thing an artist can have is his inspiration and that was an inspiring moment for me to become an artist,” he said.
Making a point to emphasis that he wasn’t under the influence of drugs and hadn’t even had a “glass of wine,” Brzezinski also said he had a second transcendental experience on the day noted Spanish artist Pablo Picasso died in 1973.
Although Brzezinski said he wasn’t even much of a Picasso fan, he spent the day contemplating how such a brilliant mind like Picasso’s could simply cease to exist.
Brzezinski continued on to say that as he was pondering Picasso, he suddenly heard a buzzing in his ear that turned into Picasso’s voice telling him 10 pieces of advice on how to become a successful artist.
“I was always a very visionary person when I was younger especially – I used to be visionary,” he said with a small chuckle.
Although he’s been inspired by the mystical realm, Brzezinski’s career has taken him on plenty of real world journeys.
After getting his breakthrough in Hollywood when some of his artwork appeared as a prop in a 1967 Peter Fonda movie, “The Trip,” Brzezinski moved on to San Francisco and used his talents commercially to decorate storefronts.
While mostly living in New York and New Orleans during the bulk of his career, Brzezinski also took extended excursions to Europe where he would hitchhike with his canvas and easel across the continent, often changing into a fancy suit before sticking out his thumb in the hopes of getting a nicer ride.
“In the old days you used to be able to stay in Rome for $8 a night,” he recalled. “I don’t think my life would be possible for a person starting out as an artist right now.”
Career Restoration
Since he moved to Bland, Brzezinski has recovered from his health problems and has recommitted to his work.
“I’m still coming out of the pit of my life, at least at this point,” Brzezinski said. “Kenny was crazy enough to actually invite me up here and now…I’m in his back room painting pictures and we’re going to try to turn this around.”
Prosch is serving as Brzezinski’s de facto business manager, helping to find outlets for his work and trying to find a gallery or an auction house in the Southwest Virginia area to display and sell his originals.
Examples of Brzezinski’s paintings can be seen at http://www.deliriumpublishing.com. Top-quality prints, known as “giclees,” can be purchased from the site by going to the “contact us” section and Brzezinski also said he’s available to do original works by request.
Brzezinski acknowledged that it’s a tough time to try to reinvigorate his business as the economic situation has left people with little disposable income to purchase art.
But as Prosch can tell you about his new housemate from firsthand experience, Brzezinski remains far from ready to call it a career.
“He’s quite a character,” Prosch said. “There’s never a dull moment with him around, I can tell you that.”
Nate Hubbard can be reached at 1-800-655-1406 or .