About how spontaneous drawing turned into fear of judgment, and how painting, years later, became a way back to myself.
When we are three years old, we do not wonder whether we know how to draw. We pick up a crayon and leave a mark. We do not ask whether the colour fits, whether the proportions are right, whether anyone will understand it, or whether it is good enough to be shown. We simply create.
My journey with art probably began the way it begins for many of us – with sheets of paper, crayons and spontaneous scribbling. At a time when I did not yet know that it was possible to create something badly.
WHEN COMPARISON ENTERED
Then came kindergarten. Shared assignments, the same subject, a set amount of time. Socialisation is, of course, a necessary part of a child’s development, but very early on it also begins to teach us to look at ourselves through other people’s eyes.
I started comparing my drawings with those of the other children. Sometimes it was incredibly inspiring. I would see how someone had drawn something and want to try it myself. I became more precise, more attentive, I learned. But somewhere between inspiration and comparison, judgment also began to appear. And with it, the first question: is what I am doing good enough?
There is one drawing from that time that I still remember. I painted a little house and a tree on the horizon. The tree connected the earth with the sky. I showed it to my brother, who was two years older than me and a huge authority in my eyes at the time. He looked at it and said: “Well, finally you’ve painted something well.”
Today I can hear the judgment in that sentence too. But as a little girl, what I felt most was pride. Someone whose opinion mattered deeply to me had looked at something I had created and decided that it was good. Maybe that is why I still remember that image.
I did not yet know how quickly the joy of creating could become connected with the need for approval.
WHEN CREATING BECAME A TASK
At school, almost everything was evaluated. Art too. Spontaneous creation increasingly became another assignment to complete. The subject was given, the result was examined, compared and graded. On one hand, those structures developed my abilities. I learned to search for solutions, work on technique and think creatively within a specific task. On the other hand, I looked inward less and less.
The question “what do I want to create?” slowly began to give way to another one: “what am I allowed to create, and what will other people say about it?”
I remember one of the portraits I began drawing around that time. A young man with a shaved head and a cross-shaped earring. My very religious grandmother looked at it and said something like, “It’s a nice drawing, but that cross in his ear is out of place.”
A small sentence, and yet it stayed with me. Because somewhere around then another question began to appear: do I have the right to show the world as I see it? What is allowed to be shown? What is considered appropriate? What fits within the culture, religion and rules of the world we grow up in?
I WASN’T A GOOD STUDENT
I struggled to find my place within the education system. Difficulties with concentration became increasingly noticeable already in primary school. Over time I developed more and more ways of avoiding school, and by secondary school, being absent had become almost normal for me.
Today I can look at that girl very differently. Back then, what I mostly heard was that I was lazy, that I was not trying hard enough, that I simply needed to “pull myself together”. Difficulties with concentration, overwhelm or school anxiety were not spoken about in the way they are today. There were labels instead. And when we are given enough labels, it becomes very easy to start believing that they describe the truth about who we are.
When the time came to choose what to study, I used to joke that, judging by my grades, I basically had two options: the Academy of Physical Education or the Academy of Fine Arts, because physical education and art were the subjects that seemed to confirm I could actually do something well. My parents supported my interest in art.
I began preparing for the entrance exams to the Academy of Fine Arts with Thelemach Pilitsidis, a Greek artist living in Głogów. Later I continued preparing in Wrocław. Simply being inside the Academy felt extraordinary, as if for a moment I had already stepped into the world I wanted so badly to belong to. But wanting it was not enough. I did not get in.
“IF I WERE AN ARTIST, I WOULDN’T BE APPLYING TO THE ACADEMY”
I enrolled in an art foundation programme, treating it as another step towards the Academy. A year later, I tried again. During the entrance exam, one of the professors looked through my portfolio and said something along the lines of: “If you are already studying art, then you are an artist.”
It hurt me deeply. I was young, rebellious, and I replied: “If I were an artist, I wouldn’t be applying to the Academy.”My portfolio was rejected.
By then I was already a young woman supporting myself, but I did not want to give up. I began working on painting and drawing with Agnieszka Prusak. For the next two years, I prepared for another attempt.
And eventually something happened that I still remember. The professor who had previously rejected my portfolio looked at my work and asked:
“Why aren’t you studying at the Academy yet? You paint like a fifth-year student.”
Waiting to Take My Place / W oczekiwaniu na zajęcie miejsca
2006 – acrylic on canvas, 110 × 150 cm
That professor was Aleksander Dymitrowicz. He later became one of the most important teachers on my path. At first he taught me humility, and later he supported me enormously. When he saw my photographs from Cuba, he also encouraged me to begin a second degree – Photography and Multimedia at the Faculty of Media Arts.
In the end, I completed my master’s degree in Painting and my bachelor’s degree in Media Arts in the same year. But the most important lesson the Academy gave me had very little to do with technique.
WHEN PAINTINGS STOPPED BEING JUST PAINTINGS
The final years of my studies coincided with one of the most difficult periods of my life. I was going through a mental health crisis and was in a very turbulent relationship. My studies were one of the few things keeping me going, while at the same time being an enormous challenge in themselves. I was preparing two diploma projects simultaneously, and there were moments when I genuinely did not know whether I would make it to the end.
I had already prepared my diploma works. Some of them were destroyed. I was left with fear, creative paralysis and the knowledge that I would have to begin again. For a long time, I could barely paint. I was afraid I would not graduate.
And then Professor Dymitrowicz told me, in his characteristically direct way, that if I brought that kind of rubbish to my review, he would not allow me to proceed with my diploma. Brutal? Yes. But by then I knew him well enough to hear something more underneath it: you are capable of something more truthful.
Today I can see that my earlier paintings may have been technically correct, but they were not yet truly connected to me. Only when I ran out of ideas, control and ways of inventing a “good painting” did I begin to paint from a place I did not yet understand myself. From somewhere deeper. And that was when art began to function for me as a form of self-therapy through art, although it would take me a long time to name it that way.
Unseen / Niewidziana
2011 – acrylic on canvas, 110 × 160 cm
After those very difficult months, the day of my defence finally came. I had already completed my master’s degree and returned to the Academy to finish installing my exhibition. When I walked into the room, I saw Dymitrowicz sitting opposite my paintings. Alone. In silence. Looking at them with complete attention.
What he said to me that day, I will keep for myself. Some words do not need to be published in order to carry enormous weight. They have stayed in my heart ever since, and they still move me deeply.
I think that was when I understood most clearly that his strictness had never been about making me paint more beautifully, more correctly or more academically. It was about making me stop hiding behind what I already knew how to do and daring to reach for a place that was truly mine.
Most interestingly, many years later, when I began describing those paintings again for my portfolio, they seemed to come alive. I began to see things in them that I had not been able to name when I was creating them. As if the body and the unconscious had known something before my mind was ready to see it.
Sometimes creation knows before we do.
TODAY I PAINT DIFFERENTLY
Many years later, I returned to the painting with the chair. I turned the canvas from vertical to horizontal and began working on it again. What had once been an image of waiting to take my place took on a new perspective – literally and symbolically. The more enclosed vertical composition opened sideways, as if turning the canvas had created more space and more breath.
That is how Pleasure / Przyjemność came into being. A painting about widening the horizon – outwardly and inwardly. About a space that begins to breathe when we allow ourselves to see differently.
Pleasure / Przyjemność
2006-2025 · mixed media on canvas · 150 × 110 cm
Today I see something in that transformation that feels very close to my own path. I used to wait for someone to allow me to take my place. For someone to confirm that I was good enough to study, to paint, to show my work, to call myself an artist. Today I increasingly create that space for myself.
The way I paint has changed too. What for years had sometimes been an assignment, an obligation or a path towards achieving a particular goal has become experimentation again. As if, after many years, I had returned to that little girl with crayons who did not yet know that it was possible to create something badly.
I allow myself to play with colour again. I mix paints, crayons, pastels and layers without always knowing where they will lead me. I combine materials, traces and gestures. I look for lightness in colour and for a space that is no longer closed by the expectation of judgment, but can expand together with the breath.
When I stand in front of a canvas, I try to put aside everything I have learned about judging a painting. This does not mean rejecting technique. Technique remains in my hands, my eyes and my body. What I try to put aside is the voice that asks: is this good? Is it beautiful? Will anyone understand it? What will people think? Am I allowed to show this?
I am becoming less interested in creating a painting that meets someone else’s expectations. I am interested in the act of creating itself. I bring together painting, breath and movement. The canvas becomes a dance partner, colour becomes feeling, and gesture becomes a record of what is happening in the body. I breathe, move, add layer after layer and allow the painting to lead me somewhere I might not be able to reach through analysis alone. Deeper into myself. To a place where the body and what I call the soul begin to enter into dialogue.
What appears on the canvas can sometimes feel like a rebirth of something that remained hidden for years beneath layer after layer – layers created in order to belong, adapt, be accepted, survive. Through painting and breath, I remove those masks one by one. Not because they were wrong. They once protected me. But I do not need all of them anymore.
Maybe that is why the story of that chair moves me so much today. At first it was part of a still life I painted while preparing for the entrance exam and trying to earn my place at the Academy. Years later, I turned the canvas, expanded its space and allowed an entirely new painting to emerge. As if my own perspective had shifted with it.
I am no longer waiting beside the chair. I take my seat.
And maybe that is why I return to all these paintings today. I see in them not only different stages of my own path, but also traces of how easily we can move away from the spontaneity that once felt like a natural part of creating, feeling and expressing ourselves. I also see that returning is possible – not to who we were before, but to ourselves with all the experience we now carry.
Perhaps there is something in your own life that once came naturally, until at some point you began asking whether you were doing it well enough. Maybe sometimes it is worth returning there and seeing what happens when, for a moment, you stop waiting for judgment, permission or the right time.
I’m glad you’re here and that you’re reading. Thank you for the time you spend with my words and stories.
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