How It All Happened

Initially, during the 1950s and 1960s, I thought of my drawings as merely “doodles”:  I used to draw lines and shapes semiconsciously while listening to people; listening was a part of my work.

One day my attitude changed after a friend, a well-known abstractionist painter, looked at my doodles and called them “abstract compositions” showing “inner logic”, “cohesiveness”, “integrity” and conveying “hidden messages”.  In his opinion, some of them expressed visually “the howl of a soul molested by the communist system”. Perhaps he was just joking; still, I started putting them in a folder and I took them with me leaving Poland in 1983.

Much later and on another continent, when I worked night shifts and had some idle time as well as full access to a governmental copying machine, I started improving my drawings: cutting, enlarging, eliminating or adding some elements.  Eventually, in the era of high resolution scanners, Photoshop, professional eight-color printers, high quality pigments and archival papers, my incidental abstract compositions morphed into color or black & white digital fine art prints. Their message is not hidden:  they simply are illustrations of and metaphors for our contemporary life and my own aging.

Fine art I create is of course only as fine as I am able to make it fine.