Polish artist Iwona Sacharz paints languid-looking women with a linear edge — seated and standing portrait figures rendered with a meld of the Cubism and Fauvism present in the young artist’s touch. Facing the viewer head-on, unabashedly sensual, and often nude, “The women in my paintings are proud of their femininity,” Sacharz says, “They are not ashamed of it; they have no complexes.”

The subject is never one specific person; Sacharz calls them up collectively, from memory; they are an amalgam of women she has known. “The color of her hair, her look, or just something that reminds me of her,” the artist says of individual elements that make up the whole.

Likewise, she says, she wants people viewing her work “to see someone they know or recognize” — a response that she strives to elicit through the universal language of emotion. Every woman in her portraits has a title dealing with an emotion: “Joy,” “Courage,” “Strength,” Fulfillment,” or “Irony.”

Emotion and intuitive process are foundations of her practice. Sacharz paints at home in her kitchen. She first creates a sketch, then, in her head, will arrange the colors that she wants to use. Possibly more sketching follows, and she lays out the body. She keeps a small sketchbook filled with drawings of characters in different bodily positions, such as arrangements of hands or legs.

When the time is right, she hits the canvas. “Everything comes with another stain, with another shape and color,” she says.

In the past, Sacharz would throw out any canvases that she felt were not good enough. Later, she painted over them and started from scratch when she was displeased. At this point in her career, she said that, “I try to work on it until it finds its beauty and is finished.”

Born in 1982 and currently living and working in Poznan, Poland, Iwona Sacharz (pronounced “eevoh-nah sah-hazh”) did not easily find her way to the art world. Although she has a robust online presence — more than 33,000 followers on Instagram — the artist is shy and reserved, the opposite of an art influencer.

She grew up in a small village located near Kielce and studied in Częstochowa, focusing on photography and graphic design. As a child she dreamed of working in fashion because it entailed design, drawing, and choosing colors and shapes. Today, she says, “My world is a mass of emotions, earth tones, spots, and simple geometric shapes.”

Scroll further back on her Instagram timeline, and you find more than Fauvist female nudes. There is a painted cornucopia of pots and pans, espresso machines and mugs in a beautiful art deco style tableaux of warm tones. Of these still-lifes, Sacharz says, “I painted still-life in school and decided it was not interesting and pretty. So I focused on ceramics and photography.” When she circled back to still-life, she decided to jettison realism and perspective (“I hate hyperrealism; I have a camera for that,” she confides). With these new studies of household objects, she found color, composition and simplicity. “Then I created something I started to like,” she says. “It was the first time I looked at my [still-life] paintings and didn’t want to destroy them.”

In terms of inspiration, Sacharz lists some of the established greats: Vincent Van Gogh (particularly the Van Gogh artistic biography, “Passion for Life,” by Irving Stone); Paul Gauguin; Tamara de Lempicka (one of the few female artists of Polish descent that Americans would know), and also William Scott, Amedeo Modigliani, and Jerzy Nowosielski. Like many of her influences, Sacharz loves to people-watch and absorb how they express their emotions through gesture. She then speaks to her viewers through the bodily forms on her painted canvases, waiting to see if they can recognize the feelings portrayed through her placement of a hand, or a tilt of a head.

When asked what comes next, Sacharz says, “There is still a lot of emotion to be painted on women’s faces.”

Iwona Sacharz is on Instagram @iwona_iw_ and Pinterest @deliratio ~ Kelli Bodle, Jacek Gancarz