Twenty-eight-year-old Klara Ostaniewicz draws almost exclusively with a 2B pencil.

She’s working on her master’s thesis, and she’s also employed by a small but well-known studio called Projekty Sylwii Strzeleckeiej in Warsaw, Poland.  “I help with projects, draw designs on the computer and do the concepts of interior house designs,” she said.

She started drawing in 2001 while prepping for exams.  An engineer who graduated from Warsaw Technical Institution, she considers herself an artist too – and one who rarely travels without a pencil in her handbag.

She seeks out works by famous architects.  She’s drawn to the complicated structures by Pritzker-Prize winners like Calatrava, and Gehry buildings, but likes the simple architecture by Piano, Meier and SANAA.  And she likes to travel, to places like Vienna, with its contemporary architecture stitched in to the fabric of the old.

Her work was featured recently in an exhibition in Fabryka Koronek, Warsaw’s contemporary art gallery.   For that show she said she was inspired by objects designed and built in the last twenty years.  She said her drawings in that exhibit were bound by the performance of architectonical structures portrayed as penetrating interior and exterior spaces.

But it’s the medium of the pencil and the palette it yields that make her work stand out.

 “It’s fascinating that you can have one pencil and get a lot of gray values,” she said.

 For more on Klara Ostaniewics, go to http://klarysunki.blogspot.com

For more on Fabry Kakoronek, go to http://www.fabrykakoronek.pl/pl/8

For more on Projekty Sylwii Strzeleckeiej, go to www.projektysylwiistrzeleckiej.pl/

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