Köpröczi Rózsa: A grafikus Szőnyi. Rajzok, vázlatok, tanulmányok (Pest Megyei Múzeumok Igazgatósága – Szőnyi István Alapítvány, Szentendre – Zebegény, 1996)

COMPOSITIONAL SKETCHES "During the whole process of painting, until the last brush-stroke practically we always draw as well." ...and this is the way the picture makes the impression of harmony that the drawing and colour were born in the same moment." (SZŐNYI ISTVÁN: A RAJZ, P. 13., A KÉPZŐMŰVÉSZET ISKOLÁJA, KÉPZŐMŰVÉSZETI ALAP KIADÓVÁLLALATA, BR, 1967.) When drawing, an artist often thinks of the painting to be born, dreams about the colours, and in the course of drawing he always paints as well. Interesting pieces of the selection are the compositional sketches which prepare some significant canvases. The familiar figures, the women and the men observed in the village had never posed for Szőnyi. Recalling from his "notes" he arranged and lined them in his canvases. The final solution was formed from entangled Unes, through lots of variations. He arranged and varied his figures according to different rhythms into diverse formations, moving on a wide scale of technical solutions. The way towards colours led through the hard, stringy lines of pen, the ethereal tones of washed ink, the soft, black depths of charcoal and the traces of pencil. Sometimes he had dreamt about and written their names on the sketches. But besides direct planning, similarly to Rembrandt, he often immersed deeply in the joy of drawing. This was the time when small drawings were created, which represent the entity found in this segment of the world in the most simple way. On some of the leaves he seems not to have used any devices, it is with the laconism of Japanese pen and ink drawings and the strictness of "minimal art" that he built up infinity from nothing. Anybody can see this kind of wonder on the charcoal sketch "At the Danube" representing the monumental mirror of the Danube and the endless sky stretching between a black soft-edged line and a tiny horse-drawn cart. And this needed as much as a few black patches left by charcoal on the white paper. This wonder returns on several pictures of the Danube topic. The women or men working on the river-bank or on the hillside merge into a cosmic totality with the landscape surrounding them. Szőnyi was able to create an atmosphere around the main figures - who can be people, animals or objects - of the drawings and paintings that could raise even the most ordinary things over the concreteness of temporality. It is an extraordinary experience to see the outlines of the famous canvases "Evening" or "In the Yard" appearing from the tangled lines, when painterly invention becomes perceptible, and the birth of the idea can be observed. Turning over the leaves the reader might hopefully feel the taste and spice of this genre. This world might be more laconic though just as exciting as that of the coloured paintings if one spares time to discover it.