Beginning in 1905, Wojtkiewicz began to create paintings in which he continued to develop on the themes he had explored in his drawings. Initially working in oils, he later shifted to tempera, a type of paint that allowed him to achieve specific, matte color tones. These muted, powdery colors added to the nostalgic mood of the scenes the artists imagined and painted. His portraits of this period, painted in a decorative style, were highly evocative and seemed to embody melancholy reflection.
Wojtkiewicz was a frequent visitor of the intellectual and artistic salon of Krakow-based medical professor Stanislaw Pareński and his wife, Eliza Pareńska of the Mühleisens. His works of this period include painted portraits of the lady of the house, who was his friend, and of her daughter, Maryna Pareńska-Raczyńska. He also produced likenesses of Liza, the muse of Krakow's bohemia, as well as of leading intellectuals, scientists and academics, including Boleslaw Raczyński, Maksymilian Rosen and Zygmunt Skirgiello.
Wojtkiewicz's imagination remained focused on a series of motifs and themes that eventually arranged themselves into a loose series titled Monomania, in which the artist penetrated the depths of the human psyche and the sphere of a-normality. The maniacs he depicted in his paintings represent existential fears and obsessions, the sadness and pain of existence unfiltered by social and cultural convention (Pathos, c. 1906; A Stroll in a Carriage, 1906; Madmen in the Snow, 1906; Lunacy - The circus of Madmen, 1906). He enclosed his 'madmen' within their hermetic world, imprisoned them on wheeled platforms, deformed them through caricature.
In time, however, the artist transformed them into representatives of his artistic fiction - i.e. masked comedians, clowns and pierrots, frozen and unmoving, restricted by helplessness, imprisoned in their own thoughts as pensioners nearing their death might be, his standard array of actors are accompanied by marionettes and puppets that seem to embody human feelings and more lively, tragic and grotesque than the clowns.
Wojtkiewicz drew this idea of animating dolls from the marionette theories of Heinrich von Kleist and the reformist theatrical concepts of Maurice Maeterlinck (Dolls, 1906). In his canvasses, the marionettes engage in tournament duels, dance in tight embraces and gesture in a lively manner before the stunned gazes of viewers who stand still, daydreaming or fantasizing.
The episodes Wojtkiewicz retells - be they dramatic, melodramatic or farcical - seem suspended between the reality of ordinary experience and imagined space. Stripped of their narrative dynamic, they are transformed into symbols of moods, their symbolic meanings conveyed through facemasks that are sometimes repeated and often appear as crowds of masked figures - in a manner similar to the canvasses of James Ensor or Edvard Munch (In Front of a Miniature Theatre - Circus, 1906-1907; Feast, 1906).
Another realm that Wojtkiewicz continued to explore in his art with increasing depth was the world of children. In 1905 he painted three variations on the motif of a children's procession - Children's Procession, Children Surprised by a Storm and Children's Crusade. The artist drew his inspiration from the children's crusade to Jerusalem depicted in Marcel Schwob's La Croisade des enfants (Paris, 1896).
In Wojtkiewicz's canvasses, the muted color scheme dominated by grays and matte blues exudes gloom and suggests the desperation of the small pilgrims who are depicted as venturing into the unknown and struggling against the natural elements. On the other hand, certain decorative features are observable in his compositions of the Children's Poses series, painted in tempera in 1908. In these works, the artist imbued his colors with power and a muted, internal light. Another of Wojtkiewicz's themes which he explored in many variations were the passions of a princess and her suitor - their amorous disappointments, farewells, elopements and leaps into the void (The Parting; The Escape; The Attack; The Entourage; Into the Void - Madness; The Tournament).
The artist intensified the fictional dimension of these fairy-tale scenes by inserting out of the ordinary objects into their rural settings. In some of these canvasses the viewer encounters a wooden toy horse, in others there are flowerpots with fancifully deformed plants - more likely in a greenhouse than in a garden.
These motifs would reappear in the Ceremonies series, which crowns Wojtkiewicz's oeuvre. Unfortunately, the artist stopped working on this series in 1909 when he was afflicted with a life-threatening disease. The works in this cycle fully manifest Wojtkiewicz's original poetic inspired by French Parnasism, English aestheticism, as well as the dramas of Maurice Maeterlinck and Oscar Wilde. Manifest in them is the artist's sophisticated aesthetic tastes, his sense of erotic subtext and hidden perversions as well as his ironic distance towards the matters of everyday life.
The individual pieces in the series Z Dziecięcych Póz (Children's Poses) and Ceremonie (Ceremonies) were accompanied by drawings that the artist treated as autonomous artworks, which functioned independently and were far from being mere preparatory sketches. In these drawings, the protagonists of his children's dramas are depicted as entwined in web-like nets of dried branches, twigs and flowers, while little princesses and princes, surrounded by their courtiers, disappear in the folds of richly patterned robes. All of them seem paralyzed by thought, their attention focused on their inner worlds (The Entourage, The Princess's Attendants). In Wojtkiewicz's paintings of the Ceremonies series, the underlying theme is court ritual, transpiring in idyllic landscapes or the stifling interiors of palaces. Thus we have artful ornamentation on the clothing of the princesses and princes, rich patterns on refined fabrics, sophisticated hats and diadems adorning the heads of small figures who are frozen, lost in thought or gaze narcissistically into their own reflections in a pond's surface Apparition - A Fairy Tale. Juxtaposed against scenes of regal adoration like The Princess's Attendants, The Summons, or The Idyll - Wooing, Wojtkiewicz's images depicting figures meditating on the meaning of life and death acquire ambiguous meaning, as can be seen from The Death of a Girl - Liberation, Meditations - Ash Wednesday, Christ and the Children. In a scene that paraphrases the biblical motif, what surprises is the lazy sensuality of the girls, who seem to tempt Christ with ripe fruit and seduce him with seemingly innocent charm.