You can't fake the kind of intimate familiarity with nature the drawings and paintings of Elzbieta Sikorska suggest of their artist. Working on large canvases, Sikorska creates dense surfaces through a network of woven lines.

Not one for discussing the details of her work, the artist said, "I'm not very interested in my own motivations and self-analysis." Whether this is because she is reticent of her skills with the language - "I am not a native English speaker," Sikorska offered as an excuse - or because she truly is reluctant to dictate meaning, is unclear. What is clear, however, is that, in refusing to assign purpose, she gives the audience sole responsibility for analyzing and intuiting her work's meaning.

Sikorska's drawings are reminiscent of those large-scale photographs that once littered the walls of dental offices in the 1980s, which is a risk all landscape artists take. Instead of blending into the background, however, Sikorska's work demands attention; demands consideration; demands to be interpreted as something more than filler.

Now a resident of Silver Springs, Md., Sikorska was born in 1950 in Warsaw, Poland. She earned an M.F.A. in graphic arts from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. By way of West Berlin, she moved to the United States in 1986. Her accolades include a fellowship for visual arts from the Arts and Humanities Council of Montgomery County in 2003; the individual artists award for visual arts from the Maryland State Arts Council in 2002; and a travel and study grant from Fondation de l'Entraide Intellectuelle Européene in Paris in 1978.

"Elzbieta Sikorska: Drawing Landscapes" is on display through March 28 at the third floor gallery in Ex Libris, 228 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd.