Born in Nowy Sącz, 1908; died in 1992 in Bielsko-Biała where he spent the better part of his life. A graduate of Kraków’s State Teacher College (1930); studied under the tutelage of Henryk Policht (1888–1967), a renowned Kraków landscape painter and a pupil of Józef Mehoffer.
Held various positions in public and social life. He was a teacher by profession, but his lifetime consuming passion was painting.
He served as an officer in the Polish Army in the 1939 Defensive War, during which he was taken prisoner and spent the remainder of the war in POW camps. During that time a big influence on his style was his companion in misfortune from the Murnau camp, Maksymilian Feuerringer (1896–1985), a mature artist, well versed in the different trends of contemporary European art.
After the war, Kopczynski returned to Poland and settled in Bielsko, where he became one of the first members of the city’s local branch of the Association of Visual Artists. He began to be involved in social and creative activities.
His main areas of interest were easel and watercolour painting. His paintings show landscapes, genre scenes, historical buildings, monuments, interiors and portraits. He was a very good colourist. His paintings can be said to be Polish through and through and full of wistfulness and nostalgia.
In 1961, he and his colleagues from Bielsko-Biała founded the Beskid Group, whose artistic programme was based on their interest in the folklore and landscape of the Beskidy Mountains.
In 2008, a centenary celebration to mark his birthday was organized by Galeria Bielska BWA. The celebration took the form of a retrospective exhibition, which accompanied an album containing a wealth of biographical material and reproductions of his works.