Blackbirds

One of the last works of art that Stabrowski has painted depicts the prophets of death – the blackbirds. Three blackbirds are sitting in the bottom left corner of the composition. The background contains green flatlands and blue horizons. The brush technique is light and transparent. Such a method creates an otherworldly and unreal realm. A faint, hard-to-see winding pathway comes into this realm over the green flatlands. It is the pathway between here and there, transience and eternity. It is important to remember that, apart from the blackbird serving as a symbol of death, some cultures, especially of the northern nations, consider these animals the creators of the world and the first ancestor, a symbol of a deadly predecessor. The frequency of this motif in Stabrowski’s works at the end of his life leads scholars to believe that the artist wanted to express his personal feeling of death rather than the beginning of the world.