about the artist

Lidia Rozmus was born and reared in Poland and studied at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow and the Art Institute of Chicago. She has lived in the United States since 1980 and works as a graphic designer, teacher and sumi-e artist, and haiku poet. In addition to illustrating many books and chapbooks, Lidia has published three books of her own graphic work and poetry and has shown her sumi-e and haiga throughout the United States, in Poland, in Japan. She is art editor of the journal Modern Haiku and designer/cover painter for Mayfly magazine.

The artistic traces I leave—my sumi-e.

They are the records of my existence and the processes of my energy.

They are my sign language in which only the essence of form needs to be expressed, and “a brush stroke gesture” is quicker than thought.

So they are non-intellectual, intuitive shapes, hopefully capturing the spirit, rather than the semblance of the subject matter, and in that abstract format, I communicate my truth and feelings to the real world of the people who look at these “signs”.

During my Japanese travels I learned the culture and arts and befriended artists, calligraphers and poets. All those experiences enriched greatly my understanding of “the spirit” that “lives” in sumi-e. I was fortunate to study sumi-e with great teachers and artists, Qigu Jiang and Shozo Sato.

artist's photograph • artist's resume page 1 (pdf) • artist's resume page 2 (pdf)