Aleksandra Nowak appears to be channeling a less-tortured Egon Schiele on to her bittersweet canvases. Moving her oil paints as if they were watercolors, in much the same manner as Schiele, Ms. Nowak's work evokes memories of Schiele, the darkest of the Vienna Succession painters. She paints as he would have painted had he not been clinically depressed and paranoid.

Crediting the Secession movement that swept Europe, including her native Poland, during the thirty years that straddled the 19th and 20th centuries, she has no problem confessing her debt to, and affinity for, the secessionist painters. While most of us are familiar with Klimt, and Schiele from Austria; Fernand Khnopff and Felicien Rops from Belgium, the names Stanislaw Wyspianski and Witold Wojtkiewicz have little meaning to those residing outside of Poland. These two artists, however, are perhaps her most important influences.

Aping neither the Khnopff-like work of Wyspianski or the Van Gogh influenced paintings of Wojtkiewicz, Nowak nevertheless pays homage to both in her masterfully crafted portraits and landscape paintings.

What? Am I actually reading the word 'landscapes' in conjunction with CFM Gallery? It is true that Aleksandra's landscapes are the first from this genre to be exhibited at the gallery. She uses her landscapes as her palette-cleanser; she loses herself in the beauty of flora, allowing herself to recover from the high level of concentration which she lavishes on her emotionally charged figurative work.

Intensely private, when asked to explain her paintings she gently smiles and hopes that the subject will change. As with many of the truly talented artists it has been my privilege to know, Aleksandra views herself as a conduit. She is conscious of the artistic requirements of her paintings, but, even so, does not feel that it is she that is their genesis. She sees a movement, a passerby's attitude, a fascinating feature on an otherwise non-arresting face and suddenly this quiet, shy, observer of the human condition, becomes forward and articulate as she convinces total strangers, as well as friends and acquaintances, to serve as her model. She paints primarily from life and strives to tell the back story of her subjects through a synthesis of body language and aura.

Studying art in both her native Poland and in the United States, she has taken from both, the highest standards. Her maternal grandparents were born in Massachusetts and migrated to Poland at a time when most people were flowing in the opposite direction. When she visited this country as a young woman there was an immediate bonding with America and she decided to move her life to this country.

Introduced to the gallery by Jan Kapera, a talented Polish journalist, her work embodies the gallery's insistance on both technical virtuosity and vision.