My Dialogue with Miłosz
Radosław Romaniuk in conversation with Katarzyna Karpowicz
Let us start with Gift – the title of a poem by Czesław Miłosz and the title of an exhibition about his poetry interpreted through your painting. Gift is also the title of a painting from your previous exhibition, Blue Dream, held at the Artemis Gallery in Krakow. What was the path from that blue Gift to the sixteen gifts – paintings inspired by Miłosz’s work?
That blue painting titled Gift tells the story of a journey in an old train compartment. The word "Gift," written in illuminated letters, appears in the form of a lamp above the compartment window. And it is a thought about what will happen later, because I already knew that I wanted to devote all my time to working on the Vilnius exhibition about Miłosz’s poetry.
Gift is the poem that is closest to me, which helped me through difficult moments when I needed to remind myself of how beautiful life is. And that it is only here for a brief, small moment. So Miłosz walked with me. Actually, as early as high school, I knew that I wanted to do something for him, together with him, or thanks to him. And then last year I realized that I was indeed ready to paint pictures inspired by his work.
But returning to the blue Gift, there is a reference in the railway travel motif to other paintings of mine, those under the shared title Journey to Szczebrzeszyn. Because Szczebrzeszyn and Vilnius are connected – I had an intuition that they shared something in common. And it was only when visiting the place where Miłosz was born that I saw that I was truly at home, that is, in a world parallel to Szczebrzeszyn, the town of my childhood where I used to spend my vacations. My whole family would take an eight-hour journey on the Hetman train from Krakow to Szczebrzeszyn. I began painting train journeys as a response to a dream and an intuition that somewhere out there we are all riding in a compartment. It is a metaphor for the journey after death.
My uncle, as he was passing away, told me about his dream. He dreamed of my father, his brother. My late father was sitting in a train compartment. My uncle was knocking on the glass, and my father gestured that he could not hear. However, it seemed that he was already comfortably settled in there. I took this not only as a beautiful vision, but also as a profound, striking sign for me, because right at that time I painted a picture in which my father was riding a train. He, I, my mother, and my sister are traveling together to Szczebrzeszyn. And that was precisely that first painting, Journey to Szczebrzeszyn.
Perhaps we should have started the conversation with the painting A Very Short Beautiful Moment, which is your commentary on the poem Gift, and then moved on to the blue Gift – because this is "a very short beautiful moment" about life, isn't it? And not about death.
Death is also about life, because passing away and arriving are the exact same process to me. I try to look at it that way. And through the shadow, I perceive light. And through the light, I also perceive shadow. A Very Short Beautiful Moment features illuminated expanses of bay blue, a very pure, lush green. And in this laconic, fairly simple painting, there is a lot of air. And an inner triangle: a woman, a man, and a dog.
Thanks to the sketches, we know that this man was initially a girl...
He was initially a bit of me sitting in the garden by a laptop, because that is also how I sometimes work in Szczebrzeszyn. Later, he turned into a young man in a pinstriped suit. Next to him was a little dog, and finally, a girl joined.
In this painting and in many of your works, there are books. How do you view the relationship between literature and painting, the book and the visible world, painting and poetry?
For me, painting is, in a sense, an escapist shelter. The process of painting and building worlds itself is one, but I also often find shelter in the painting of other artists. The same goes for literature. The books I reach for are a salvation for me – and always have been. Painting and reading merge in my consciousness in yet another way. I often remember what I was reading, what I was listening to, where I was, what I was eating while painting a specific canvas. It is similar with books. I like returning to them because I recall the moments in life when they came to me. And I read them anew. Sometimes one can also be disappointed, because a book, music, or painting that was important at a given stage cannot resonate the same way at a different point in life. So when something resonates, you have to embrace it.
That is why it seems enviable to me that you had this time with Miłosz. Now, after having painted sixteen canvases, do you think of him differently, look at him in a different way?
Of course, completely differently. In a way, it was working with another human being who is no longer here. And it gave rise to a kind of longing for him. A certain absence. This process befriended me with a person I never met. Although when I was little, I must have been five or six years old, my mother pointed out Czesław Miłosz to me, sitting in a café. I remembered it for the rest of my life, just as I remembered Tadeusz Kantor’s exhibition in 1990. And I don’t even know if it wasn’t on the very same day: I saw that exhibition and I saw Miłosz. I don’t know how I knew who Czesław Miłosz was; I simply trusted my mother, who is a good judge of people, that this must be an interesting, exceptional figure. Now I was able to consciously take a close look at this man, and I feel as if I know him in some way. Even though he doesn't know about what I have done. That isn't so important, is it? But for me, this acquaintance is very important.
These paintings are deeply rooted in your visual language – the exhibition Gift seems to be a natural point of arrival. Elements converge here that could have appeared in your earlier exhibitions; for example, the portrait of Miłosz as a child could have hung at the recent Łódź exhibition You Only Live Once, You Only Die Once. Do you feel that the experience of reading and painting has enriched your work – in both an inner and technical sense?
Very much so. Above all, I had always painted works that were inspired by my own stories, that came from within me. Of course, I was fascinated by film, literature, music, but the paintings were born of my own imagination. And here I set myself a task. And I wanted to carry it out in a way that was unusual for me, namely through drawing. Works on paper were always important to me, but at the same time somewhat detached from what I painted. I would record a lot of things that way, make notes, but I didn't treat them as ideas for a painting. Here, I assumed that I would first find a text that shook me, because that is always how I work: in order to create a painting, I have to experience an emotional shock, a moving experience, an enchantment. That is not popular in today’s world, but for me, it is important that art enchants. It must engrave something deeply into my soul. And only then am I able to draw out enough energy from within myself to transfer it onto the canvas. So I assumed that in an exhibition based not on mine, but on someone else's world, I had to look very closely at the texts and fragments that moved me, which I could translate into my artistic reality – with respect for that author’s world. With deference, with a certain lesson that I could draw from contact with him. So he is the first one, I take in the impulse, and then I search. And in order to search, I wanted to focus on sketching. I imagined, perhaps a bit naively, that a person who writes has a lot of paper around them. And they make notes, handwritten jottings, and later, paring it all down, they create a whole.
You also decided to work with paper.
First of all, I decided to work with paper. Secondly, I wanted to search on paper for multiple versions of a single source. And once I hit upon it and knew that this was it, I would then treat it as an essence, a record of my reception of the poem – and only then transfer it onto canvas. And later, that canvas could prompt something to me; I could delve deeper. The sketches evolve, they change. Their task was to knock me out of the racing thoughts and diverse interpretations of a single text. They were meant to delineate a safer field of exploration.
You spoke of respect toward Miłosz and the impulse he gives to the paintings. And indeed – you listened to him, you tried to understand, but later you responded in your own language, in your own words. And some canvases seem very distant from the impulse that summoned them. This is visible at the level of titles: the paintings are not titled like Miłosz’s works. And their very content is far from illustrative. Such is the case, for example, with the painting Faces I Meet in a Dream, inspired by the poem Mittelbergheim.
For me, it is a poem about a sense of safety in a completely different, distant place. I have experienced that feeling many times. It is incredible when you are somewhere far away and you are at such a moment in your life where you can tuck yourself away a bit in that place and feel at home. And here, things that feel safe to me appear, such as the paints, writing implements, painting tools, and sketchbooks that often appear in my paintings. I nestle a little into his stories, his poems. I bring my own objects into them and converse with him like a painter who has in painting the same thing he had in the word. Each of us creators – who do something out of conviction because we cannot do otherwise, because it is our world and we escape into it to exist in that world, to develop, to probe deeper – is in some way similar to others, fraternal toward them. This exhibition is a friendly handshake, a gesture of respect toward literature, but also a revelation of my painterly world.
Miłosz’s Mittelbergheim is a kind of harbinger of the poem Gift, an exercise for that poem, which after all also deals with a foreign, yet momentarily one's own, place. And it is also a poem that teaches acceptance of the world. In your Faces I Meet in a Dream, you also painted "a very short beautiful moment." But are these "faces" the faces you want to meet?
The face is interesting to me in itself. A great deal of history happens on the human face. Unconsciously, I paint the stories of different people. Both in my painting and in poems, I see faces and lives I have never known. Faces that do not exist, certain outlines of faces. They also come to me in dreams, and it seems to me that I have a strong connection to the world I dream of – because I reach into it so often.
In this exhibition, there are two such paintings: In a Dream, Words and Images Come and Faces I Meet in a Dream…
There is also The Fisherman’s Nap, inspired by the poem On Angels. The painting was created in Szczebrzeszyn. A friend of our family who lives there likes to take a nap before going fishing, and sometimes after. That is why I gave the painting this title.
And what if Miłosz asked you: "Ms. Kasia, what does this actually have to do with my poem On Angels?"
Well, Mr. Czesław… You wrote in a letter to Jan Lebenstein: "For several decades, I tried to persuade you to paint calm, fat cows in a meadow, lifelike. I tried to persuade myself too, but I wasn't very successful at imitating my favorite hero, Ferdinand the bull, smelling the flowers." I would also love to paint Ferdinand the Bull, but something nevertheless pulls me to paint canvases that tell of the struggles to understand what is happening around us. There are different levels of dejection or awareness of transience, one's own and the world's. So here, dear Mr. Czesław, is simply something that troubles me. And that is what my response to the poem On Angels looks like, in which you ponder what is "over there." I am an agnostic, but I would very much like there to be something – for all those friends and loved ones of mine over there, and for myself, so that I could meet them.
And the man depicted on that canvas with the head of a bull and a tear in his eye?
You asked me about that recently. Just then, I dreamed that I might know who it is – that it might be my father. My conversation with Miłosz is, in a sense, a conversation with the figure of an absent person, and an absent person is also my dad. It is also a story about how it is impossible not to have regrets, right? That someone could not go on creating. Even people who are older pass away too soon for me, if they are outstanding creators. It is always too early.
In this painting, there are also masks – which I must also ask you about, because it is an element that appears on your canvases very often. Why are there sometimes only masks alone, other times figures in masks, and sometimes figures taking those masks off? What are these masks to you?
The first impulse was African masks. In 2014, while living in Budapest, I saw them at the Oceanarium/Africarium and felt how mysterious they were. This coincided with watching the city, the people in the streets, the feeling of how unfathomable their language is, and the awareness that one can only draw a tiny bit from their culture, but still understand nothing without knowing the language, the literature. That was when I painted the first picture depicting people and masks. And since then, I have used the symbolism of the mask to paint various stories that usually spoke of the complexity of human nature. In my paintings, it is often like a curtain: being drawn back, being closed. The masks look like stage design in a theater. If we reflect on the human being, we arrive at the conclusion that we exist in various roles. And in each role, we wear a different face, a different mask. Although we are the same person, over the years we also sometimes change beyond recognition, and even if our source is somewhere back there, for instance in childhood, we can be different people at different stages of life. And there is nothing wrong with that.
Masks carry neither a negative nor a positive connotation for me. They are an additional narrative superimposed onto a figure. That is, a figure becomes multidimensional when I can add a mask to it – for example, one that lends strength, or a mourning mask, or one reminding of death, like a mask in the shape of a skull. These masks mean archetypally similar things across different cultures. There are masks designed to ward something off or to summon something, to prepare for something.
So they are not something unwanted, external?
For me, masks are strength, value, a kind of truth. Exactly. For me, they are truth.
You spoke of the theatricality of these paintings. One can often see a stage in them – with a curtain of trees and a sun or moon like a theatrical spotlight. On the canvas Pink Little Ball, you even painted a curtain…
Looking at these paintings now, I think that what connects them to poetry is reduction. I formulate myself in such a way that I reduce reality; that is why these paintings may seem too simple or too theatrical, too laconic. But it seems to me that this is precisely what builds their strength and a kind of tension.
Through economy.
Yes. Economy and the expression of form. For example, there are no realistic hands here, but even though something is off about them, there is an expression in them that breaks reality. One could even say that in these figurative paintings, there is a great deal of abstraction; one can look at them as abstraction, as form.
But you mean abstraction related to the figuration itself, not color?
I am thinking primarily of figuration, though their color was also sought after for a very long time. Although I use it, as you noticed, as if on a stage: there is a spot where the spotlights are aimed, somewhere something is illuminated.
The stage also has the quality that in certain places, half-light reigns. It seems to me that there is more darkness in your painting than in Miłosz’s poetry, if only because Miłosz, when writing his childhood self-portrait, would not have outlined a background that is essentially a nocturne.
One must take into account during which months I worked on this exhibition, because that is also interesting. Each of my exhibitions is created at a given time and is marked by its light. I started in May, but most of these paintings were created in autumn and winter. If I had painted in California, I assure you that Miłosz’s poems would have resonated with radiance.
I already asked you about the masks. Another recognizable detail of your painting is the blue little ball. It also found its way into Miłosz’s world.
For me, the blue little ball, as I always say, was a symbol of the world of the imagination, something one can examine against the light and see patterns of light and a cosmos forming. I don't know if you remember from childhood examining an object with such scrutiny, peering at it against the light and imagining something, dreaming. I thought of these little balls as hope that everyone carries within themselves. For me, it is also a symbol of human goodness, though one might wonder: is man inherently good or bad, or simply neutral and choosing between good and evil? But I am moved by the fact that we were all children and nobody wanted anything bad, right? And we were all defenseless. Everyone had hope. Dreaming of the blue little ball, nobody thought that something bad would happen to them or that they themselves would do something bad to anyone; they just wanted things to be good. I am moved by this thought and by the various gestures that people make. For example, I am moved by elderly people who have a sweet tooth and eat ice cream, or sit in cafés and buy themselves pastries.
That is their little ball.
Even though I paint pictures like nocturnes, in very contrasting colors and with a lot of darkness in them, I nevertheless always strive toward goodness. And the blue little ball was always for me a symbol of the core of humanity, the desire to move toward goodness. Goodness for oneself, but also for others. That is my hope. I always play with these little balls. I also began to wonder if this wasn't a symbol that guided me toward various other things – for example, toward the Blue Dream exhibition, where I concentrated on the color blue. And toward meeting Piotrek Oczka on my path, who in himself is a gift to me, like that blue little ball. And then again, in the painting inspired by Miłosz’s poem By the Peonies, a pink little ball lies on the table. It was entirely different, but friends brought me a pink ball from Gdańsk, and I decided to paint it because it fit in there so beautifully in terms of color. So often in my paintings, as in Collection of Favorite Objects, I place elements that are important to me and that are connected to people I have met. I do not recount this in a literal way, but I think those people can find themselves in these paintings.
Some of the paintings form mini-series, at least pairs. For example, A Very Short Beautiful Moment and We Will Meet on the Other Side, which refers to Miłosz’s poem Orpheus and Eurydice.
Only recently did I discover that they look good together. But I absolutely didn't plan it that way. Here it is about death, here it is about life, here it is about love, here it is also about love. A little dog appears, a tender sentinel, who can also be seen in The Fisherman’s Nap.
On the other hand, the male figure, who could be thought of as being rather the same man as in A Very Short Beautiful Moment, has a face resembling a mask. It is not a mask, but a face frozen in the process of participating in what is on the canvas.
Yes, I'm glad you see that, because I wouldn't want anyone to treat these faces or figures literally. Or to search for the features of specific individuals. It is even better if it doesn't matter that they appear young. They are pawns, or rather spirits, that become active in the paintings. And they serve me to speak about something that is the emotion from which the painting originates. Because truly, as I described at the beginning, to paint something, I must have a strong emotional activator. And it seems to me that people who find something in my paintings are often shaken by that activator, which they sense themselves. And indeed, nobody sees a specific person, but rather a story that acts as an engine to activate a longing for something, or a sense of absence, or being moved in connection with a certain thought.
Ultimately, I paint all the canvases at this stage of my life where I am now. Something came to me from Miłosz’s poems that I hadn't seen before, though I had intuited it. And it was obvious to me that it was about this, but now I feel it more intensely.
How would you define this "something"?
I am a painter, not a literary scholar, but in his poems and in my paintings at this moment, I feel, on the one hand, enchantment with life, and on the other hand, despair, a lament over the world. And holding on tightly to life, while simultaneously distancing oneself from it. Also seeing it from a different perspective, from the perspective of a person who no longer has that much time. And in my case, I don't know why, it is a bit like I am constantly, but now increasingly so, aware that there is only a sliver of life left to create. That is the impression I have. I simply perceive the world from the perspective of a person who – it may sound ridiculous – has this limited time.
Perhaps the words should be said here that we all have limited time. But that wasn't what you meant.
What I mean is that some people do not realize this. And their actions do not revolve around it.
If this awareness is not destructive, but mobilizing, it becomes the reason why life is appreciated and fulfilled. That is certainly also a kind of gift.
It is a kind of gift, and one must nurture it within oneself, do what one wants to do, be oneself in it, do it in one's own way, and prioritize one's own plans.
So will this Orpheus who emerges from Hades in your work be happy?
I think so. I think each of my characters will be happy. And I think people are intelligent enough to understand this: sadness does not preclude happiness. Melancholy and difficult experiences absolutely do not preclude those "short beautiful moments" of happiness. And life consists of this – of ceaseless falling and climbing, ascending, a brief moment of gazing from the summit, and descending. Descending is sometimes even more difficult than climbing.
I treat all my characters very gently and with great love. And even though they are invented, they have this "gift" from me – of goodness and life, of existence on canvas, an existence that always ends well. And a good ending is not a stereotypically good ending. It is not necessarily what everyone might understand as good for them.
That is why to the unhappy heroine of The Issa Valley, Magdalena, in the painting Night Bath in the River, you gave a kind of pride, an expression of pleasure derived from the touch of water.
Even though on this canvas one sees the awareness of the end, of transience, the dominant element is the wholeness that Magdalena forms with nature. It is a story about how it is, fundamentally, a great pleasure that we return to it, that this matter of ours circulates somewhere, that we ultimately become part of nature.
I also wanted this painting, as the only one among all the rest, to remain just as it was in the sketch. I allowed myself to show how naked, in a sense, my paintings look when they are not developed further, because that is how most canvases look before I decide to carry them on. And then they layer up, become more precise, round out.
It is wonderful that you didn't veer into the literalness of painting Magdalena dead.
I must admit that in the sketches, I drew a decapitation scene, exorcisms… It was very painterly, and I even thought of sketching it out across several canvases – that is, making a series, or even something like an altarpiece that could have wings attached to the sides. Magdalena would be on them in various visions, processes.
You absolutely must do that! Simultaneously with the Gift exhibition, you were also painting works for another show: Pure Hearted Femme Fatale. You showed me those canvases, and Night Bath in the River is a kind of bridge between matters related to Miłosz and the stories from those paintings. I wonder how you found room for two such different narratives. Was Miłosz too "masculine" for you, and did you decide that, stepping out of his world, you wanted to enter feminine stories? What lies behind the secret of this simultaneity?
Pure Hearted Femme Fatale is a completely different story that I decided to develop in parallel with my work on the Vilnius exhibition. I needed it very much as a kind of respite from a subject so intensely tied to the work of another human being. It is not the first time that I weave different stories in parallel, but later, when I look at them from a distance, they merge. Pure Hearted stems from my need to tell a story about rejecting dichotomous thinking. It is a story not only about a woman, but about every person who recognizes within themselves a complexity and multidimensionality that cannot be pigeonholed or described with a label. Perhaps you are right that this Night Bath and Magdalena from The Issa Valley triggered something in me. Perhaps you managed to pinpoint precisely one of the significant, if not most important, connections between the two exhibitions.
Let us return to Miłosz and the fact that your figures have no age. Weren't you tempted to paint Miłosz as an old man? As the man you saw as a little girl, or in photographs, in films – after all, his presence, including his physical presence, in Krakow and throughout Polish culture was very powerful. It was always the old Miłosz, while in your work, he is a child holding a bird in his little hand.
I didn't want to mark these paintings with direct realism. Even though you see me in these paintings, it isn't entirely me. It was similar with Miłosz’s presence. For instance, the eyes in the painting I See Everything Completely Differently, which appear in one of those little clouds, are the eyes of an older person who, like Miłosz, has trouble with their eyesight. The painting is meant to stimulate the senses through color, but also through texture. It has a structure that one would want to touch. And which a blind or visually impaired person might find interesting to explore.
Miłosz speaks in his poems of feeling like a child, of being simultaneously an old man, a youth, and a child. And perhaps instinctively, I wanted to give him back the life he truly felt. I remember my grandfather, at around seventy, saying that he was the exact same boy he was when he was nineteen. And I thought that, in a sense, each of us is ageless inside. Therefore, I wouldn't want to endow a man who was once a child, then a youth, and later a vigorous man in his prime, with the figure of an old man. Perhaps he simply felt like a nineteen-year-old.
Old age was one of his masks, but you said there is nothing wrong with masks.
Yes, yes, there is nothing wrong with them, but I preferred the mask of a child. Although actually, it seems to me that in childhood there are no masks, that it is the only moment in life when we are our true source. And Miłosz probably knew that, too, when writing The Issa Valley. That he returned to that source of his. And that is where I placed him, with the little bird – a bullfinch from the story about Tomasz.
Let us look finally toward the painter – at Collection of Favorite Objects. A gorgeous painting, absolutely magical. Also very literary, speaking of the power of the written word: you painted here a realistic "portrait" of Miłosz’s wonderful translation book Haiku. There are also letters and an open notebook that could be a diary. If a painting can be about literature, this one does it in a very symbolic way. I know that for you it is not an unequivocal self-portrait, but I think it will be perceived as such. Certainly this painting, certainly In the Studio I Paint Poems, and it seems to me that Evening Wind also bears the traits of a self-portrait.
I think I find myself most in that nocturnal stroll down an unfamiliar alley. All the alleys here are imagined, though they may evoke the narrow streets of Lublin or Vilnius. In a sense, I always paint myself. And these are my stories. It is inevitable. It has even happened more than once that in paintings of dark-skinned figures, someone recognized my eyes or my facial expression, so that is how it is – a person unwittingly reveals their face, their way of looking, in their paintings.
That is your presence in Miłosz’s world.
Yes, I inscribed myself into it, willy-nilly, or perhaps more willingly. I felt truly at home in that world. I have always felt good in it.
