Scholarship of the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland
I’m focused on exploring feelings and relationships since the beginning of my artistic career. During the course of creating those paintings, I have realized that in our culture, emotions are considered irrational, wild, uncontrollable powers which need to be tamed. (…)
How many times I have heard: “don’t panic!”, “try not to lose your head”, “don’t get carried away by emotions!”, “stop being hysterical”, “don’t be such a sissy!” or “man up!”; People tend to see the emotions as an obstacle for rational perception of reality. If you call someone emotional, it often questions person’s credibility and ability to think logically. For many generations we cherished a superstition that there is disparity between emotion and a reason. We can express ourselves, but only under certain circumstances- when it is commonly considered appropriate. I think there is nothing wrong with expressing one’s true emotions, until we are not deliberately trying to hurt people around us. I believe we are in some control over our feelings, but pretending not to feel anything is not at all honest.
Personally I define emotions as thoughts we experience through temporary wave or impulse. It is connected to a mixture of physical and mental stimuli. (…)
Each person experiences them individually, therefore, they are extremely difficult to recognize and identify. We decide if and who to share them with. I think the most important and the strongest emotional states are caused by relationships with people. They are the center point of all social interactions. Without emotions we would not feel the need to open up and empathize with other people.
And at night I dream of paradise
Momentary disturbances
They often use the elements
Two handfuls of cherries
Tell you my dream
The morning of foreign gestures
Lead to sleep
Sweetness
At this moment other people’s words mean nothing
Rise
Series of paintings “Where the sun falls to the ground” is an invitation to my private universe, in which I show relations among friends, free of ‘rights and wrongs’, how to be or how not to behave.
Time of vacation, spent among the group of closest friends makes us more eager to get rid of the masks we put on daily. On my canvases, I present carefree girls, enjoying each other’s company, having fun and relaxing in their own way. It is the middle of summer. Women are sunbathing, talking, sipping white wine, smoking cigarettes and indulging in seasonal snacks. I am next to them, observing and being part of the group at the same time. I memorize moments and positive vibe around them; I know I will transpose those impressions to the language of art.
Those plain times spent together mean a lot to me. I believe that given time and attention, our conversations can implement new ways to discover and interpret reality. These days, I have noticed a social tendency to look for acquaintances among “suitable” people. Those who can help us get things done, get a promotion or to simply make ourselves feel better, more valuable. Doing that, we gradually have less time to take care of our true relationships. For me, the most important are people I feel natural around. When I take lick my plate clean, get dirty, talk about my needs, motives and desires, even if they are outside of ‘socially appropriate’ box. What is usually perceived transgressive by society, it is what is natural to human kind. We don’t take well, being pressurized to conform to certain roles, not being able to explore our desires and therefore not being fully able to accept the existence itself. Healthy, mutual relationships can be built when we manage to get clean from accumulated pictures and discourse of everything we take as indisputable truths and accept the diversity of opinions of another human being.
My major artistic goal is to extract emotions, desires, moods which result from social interactions and materialize them on the canvas. I hope my objectives are clearly visible in my newly created cycle of paintings.
The paintings created in 2020 were made as part of the scholarship of the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland..