Religious themes also occur in the artist’s Chinese ink drawings. The motif of the descent from the cross or the image of the Madonna, marked with a non-uniform thick line with the help of an inked brush or a stick, is close to Chinese calligraphy in character. They are reduced to characters made with a few smooth strokes (repeated many times in case of unsatisfactory results). The backgrounds are marked with a few lines at the most, the faces are just strong outlines without any additional details.
Apart from the religious subject matter, landscapes also occupied a prominent place in Bohusz-Szyszko’s work. Shortly after settling in England, the artist returned to his native Vilnius, sketching Vilnius vedutas and fragments of buildings, as well as figures associated with the history of the city, and finally the image of Our Lady of the Gate of Dawn. Whilst the cityscapes in his oeuvre are the effect of his imagination returning to the Vilnius region, the nature in Bohusz-Szyszko’s landscapes has first of all the appearance of Scottish forests seen during his trips to the north. The landscapes were also created during the artist’s trips abroad, for example to Egypt. Jan Wiktor Sienkiewicz pointed out that even the landscapes often gain a symbolic, quasi-religious dimension through the motif of an exposed ray of light used by the painter, the metaphysical dimension of which is sometimes suggested even in the title, as in the painting Fiat Lux.
After a period dominated by religious themes, Bohusz-Szyszko returned to landscape, still life and portraits in the second half of the 1970s, making a rather strong turn and dealing with religious themes only sporadically. In late religious paintings from the 1980s, the thick texture remains, but the way of applying paint changed. It was no longer applied with strong, sharp strokes, but with occasional touches, pokes of the brush against the canvas, as if the artist was trying to combine an expressionist formula with the pointillist way of constructing a painting used years ago.
A similar combination of expression typical of Bohusz-Szyszko with a way of building a picture with short, layered brushstrokes, close to the Kapists (a 1930s Polish art movement), like Jan Cybis, can also be found in numerous portraits – of loved ones, London diplomats, people of the Church, and finally self-portraits of the painter. The texture in them remained lumpy and jittery, but the colours calmed down a little, became cooler and deeper, set in material reality (the artist’s London studio), not the metaphysical; it was full of deep browns, vivid reds, subdued greens and blues. Also, the faces, although they ‘emerged’ as it were from a pool of agitated paint, were modelled without radical distortions.