A scenic, sleepy little back road in the hamlet of High Falls would seem an unlikely place to host the creation of visionary art of international scope.

The Polish-born artist Jan Sawka and his wife, Hanna (affectionately called "Hanka"), discovered the quiet little property, with about three-quarters of an acre, through a last-minute, serendipitous encounter with a friend-of-a-friend realtor at the end of a visit to the area. They'd been talking about moving out of New York City for some time, and had hoped to find a property that could provide both a home and studio space for Jan's work. The moment they set foot out of the car, they were overwhelmed by a two-story, 19th-century stable building. Jan immediately pronounced it perfectly suited to be his studio. The nearby house—really just a small bungalow—was set in a beautifully landscaped garden, with irises in full bloom. They put down a deposit on the place right away, without even setting foot inside the house.

Jan's training as an architect came in handy as he designed the modifications required to convert the hayloft of the barn into an airy, spacious studio, leaving the original, sturdy, pegged wooden beams exposed. He added windows, stairs, and a new floor, and insulated the walls. The first floor was divided to provide storage spaces for his work, a small guest room, and a bathroom (complete with an oversized, stylized face mosaic on the floor designed by Jan).

It's obvious that the studio building—and the needs of the working artist that it embodies—overshadows the modest living space of the house, which is easily half the size of the barn. When the Sawkas first moved in, however, the necessary construction on the barn meant that Jan had no studio. So he immediately turned his artistic energies to brightening the interior of the house.

The rooms had been painted by the previous owner in a depressingly dark shade of blue, and rather ostentatiously trimmed with golden American eagles and faux Greek columns and moldings, with an incongruous, enormous bar that jutted into the kitchen. Tearing out the bar and the wall that separated the eat-in kitchen from the living room space, he created a large, continuous space, which he proceeded to paint—with a small brush, as though the interior was just one enormous canvas.

As if one enormous canvas, the sitting room and the den, with its deep window seat, were richly painted and decorated by Jan.

Sawka's art is characterized by bright, saturated colors and designs that manage to read simultaneously as poster-flat and spatially expansive. The deep-bayed window seat just off the kitchen, once a dark, dank corner, now sings with a range of light yellows, creams, and pinks, painted as though it were a subtle atmospheric sky viewed at sunrise. The walls of the living room area alternate between a light sky blue, a pale green chartreuse, and pastel peach; however, as you enter daughter Hanna Maria's room, the walls are noticeably plain white. By the time Jan got to that part of the house, the converted barn/studio was ready, so it never received the full Sawka treatment.

High Falls represents but the latest home base for the peripatetic Sawka family. Jan, who was trained as an artist and architect in his native Poland, first rose to prominence as a major force in that country's poster art movement in the 1960s and '70s. Due to his counter-culture, dissident political views—and the fact that he is a fiercely talented, effective visual artist—he faced regular bureaucratic persecution, for example receiving tightly restricted commissions for his work and being forced to constantly move because he was legally forbidden to live anywhere.