Works on Canvas - Author's Commentary

Hidden (Ukryty), 2023, 70 x 90 cm, acrylic on canvas

I am no stranger to working in the food service. I know waitressing rituals and the rhythm of a place that opens to customers who arrive in the early evening and leave late at night. The restaurant becomes a stage for their emotions, a theatre of experiences. This show will not go on without preparations made in haste, between a sip of coffee and a quick cigarette.

I saw the moment where the waiter sets out ashtrays on tables one evening in Valence, a French town. Appearances to the contrary, this is a work from the Anubis series; he is hidden in the underpainting, in the dark section of the painting.

Dear Old Friend (Stary dobry przyjaciel), 2024, 90 x 100 cm, acrylic on canvas

Espeluche is a small French town in the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region. When I visited it the first time, I felt like it was deserted. I didn’t meet one inhabitant. My boyfriend said, ‘Come on, I’ll show you a witch's house!” and let me deep into a dead-end street that ended with a crumbling tenement house overgrown with ivy. It hadn’t changed much since he was a little boy; it still stood abandoned. These days, other children probably imagine that a witch lived there.

Medieval buildings of white stone hide their secrets from random visitors. The shutters creak under the force of the wind. The town is surrounded by fields and forests growing on high hills – it’s always very windy here. The painting shows the town’s only shop. Most of the several hundred residents do their shopping in the big city, 10 kilometres away. But they come here for croissants and newspapers.

This is ordinary France, stripped bare of the myth of beauty, more authentic. Farmers grow vegetables that aren’t beautiful, but very tasty. There are homes with well-kept gardens, but there are also those where chickens roost in the rusted shells of tractors from the 1980s. Behind my boyfriend’s parents’ house grows a huge rosemary bush; it smells lovely on freshly baked garlic bread.

Anubis with Heliotropium (Anubis z heliotropem), 2024, 80 x 100 cm, acrylic on canvas

Love can have a destructive power. The nymph Clytia, the heroine of the classical myth described by Ovid in Metamorphoses, found this out. To her misfortune, Clytia fell in love with the god Helios. For her, he was the sun, and for him, she was just a passing flirtation, an ordinary situationship – a tragedy as old as time.

When Helios shifted his interest to Princess Leucothoe, the disappointed and distraught Clytia revealed the affair to the princess’ father, bringing doom upon her. Not a kind thing to do, but, well, love had made her lose her mind. It didn’t help her to get Helios back. The god Apollo decided to punish Clytia and turned her into a herliotrope – a purple flower that turns during the day, following the sun.

I like to think that we live in a world of living myths, that the stories from a thousand years ago are present in our lives, if only a tangible symbols. I often intertwine them into my works; I see my role in passing them on and giving them new meanings.

Prayer (Modlitwa), 2024, 80 x 100 cm, acrylic on canvas

I’m not religious; my spiritual needs are met by contact with nature. The sea in the painting is the Adriatic. I like its raw coastline, especially the Pelješac Peninsula and the island of Korčula.

I often think about the evening my friends and I spent with the elderly fisherman we were renting a house from. He prepared an excellent supper for us – the table was filled with everything you could catch in the sea, with the exception of octopuses. When my friends (lovers of seafood) asked him about this, the fisherman placed his hand on his heart to emphasise his words and said, ‘Octopod intelligent. I don’t fish octopod.’ That night, we sat a long time on the terrace, looking out over the water glowing with the reflection of the moon. Under the surface, octopuses built their kingdoms.

Kinki Ramen I, 2024, 70 x 100 cm, acrylic on canvas

The Anubis series has its themes; one of them is the Japanese motif of yōkai. Those who have encountered Japanese culture is bound to recognize it – yōkai, mythical creatures, monsters derived from folk traditions. There are mischievous and luck-bringing tanuki, the malicious but polit kappa, long-lived kitsune – foxes that live on the border between two worlds, nekomata – cats with two tails, animated household objects – such as the umbrella monster, kasa-obake. The list of fantastic creatures seems endless. One common characteristic of yōkai is their liminality, or ‘in-betweenness.’ They are creatures of the borderlands, living on the edge of town, or in the mountains between villages, or in the eddies of a river running between two rice fields. They often appear at twilight, that gray time when the familiar seems strange and faces become indistinguishable. They haunt bridges and tunnels, entranceways and thresholds. They lurk at crossroads,’ writes Prof. Michael Dylan Foster in his excellent The Book of Yōkai. It’s no wonder then that Anubis was bound to encounter the yōkai. After all, they have a lot in common.

Kinki Ramen I features Hyotokko – a comical character, in his trademark scarf and with a grimace on his face. In some regions of Japan, Hyotokko is regarded as the god of fire. Here, he is merely a restaurant customer – spicy ramen is his favourite dish.

Anubis with Anemone (Anubis z bukietem zawilców), 2024, 50 x 70 cm, acrylic on canvas

Anemōnē, the Greek name of the flower, means ‘daughter of the wind’. I like these flowers; they grow practically everywhere in the world, even in very cold mountain regions. I picked them in May in Greece; the meltemi wind, strong and dry, was blowing, changing the colour of the sea and scattering the clouds. What dark became sapphire blue, soaking up the sun. The grass rustled, and I had to watch out for lizards and snakes as I walked.

The Smell of Oranges (Zapach pomarańczy), 2024, 70 x 90 cm, acrylic on canvas

There are few more important questions in life than ‘what’s around the next corner?’ Maybe it’s disappointment, or maybe great beauty? In the case of this street, leading to the top of a hill on the Greek island of Zakynthos, around the corner, just past the yellow villa, is the breathtaking view of the Ionian Sea.

In the distance, the majestic island of Kefalonia vanishes in a blue haze. The air smells of oranges.

After Hours (Po godzinach), 2023, 70 x 90 cm, acrylic on canvas

The motif of the road is familiar to me. Roadside bars, petrol stations, fast-food restaurants – you can find them all in the my Anubis series. I like to look at them not through the eyes of a visitor, though, but the eye of a regular. Places frozen in time, the stagnant reality of small towns. They can be American, as in this Twin Peaks-inspired painting, but they can also be Polish.

Places that bring communities together interest me, I like to find in them the physical traces of human habits: worn out armchair seats, scratched table tops, toilet stall graffiti. I can imagine many a conversation at this pool table about disappointed love and that one neighbour who always mows the grass just when you’re planning to take a nap.

Damn Fine Coffee (Cholernie dobra kawa), 2023, 40 x 50 cm, acrylic on canvas

The series Twin Peaks, the original, made by the Lynch/Frost duo, made a great impression on me. It rooted many pictures in my mind, and this still life, unusual for me, is a kind of tribute to the series. The artefacts – a hotel room key, a coffee cup from the iconic Double R diner, a plate with a slice of cherry pie – wait for Agent Cooper, guided in his investigation not only by reason, but above all by heart and intuition. Just like me, in painting and in life ;)

Nice Fishing Spot (Przyjemne łowisko), 2023, 40 x 60 cm, acrylic on canvas

Painting can be a form of escapism for me. I create a place on canvas where I’d like to be, and I’m there. I imagine, for example, walking from the pier on the lake along a path through a forest that smells of evergreens and autumn undergrowth. Deep in a clearing stands my small wooden house, built with royalties from books I’ve written – in my dream, I am a man, a retired writer of thriller novels. For supper, I fry the fish I’ve caught and I eat them, sipping a good white wine, and then I read books (not mine) late into the night while listening to music on vinyl (probably some jazz). The vision of death does not frighten me, because all that matters is the here and now. Well, and maybe memories.

Anubis in Red Motorboat (Anubis w czerwonej motorówce), 2023, 50 x 70 cm, acrylic on canvas

I really like large, lazy rivers. Especially in places where they slip the city and the regulated riverbeds. Living in the French town of Valence, I liked to take walks along the Rhône – first on the boulevards, under the plane trees, and then on a wild path along the river. Sometimes I would see motorboats. The waves they left behind formed beautiful patterns on the surface of the water, depending on the depth and the wind. The motorboat would be long gone, but the waves remained. Eventually, they faded away. The river flowed on. I imagine the same happens with our memory.