There are things the modern world no longer notices. Old machines, worn tools, cracked wood, objects shaped by human hands. Once needed and important, today often left to be forgotten or destroyed.
I have a particular attitude towards them. Perhaps because all my life I have worked with my hands — first learning drawing and painting, later designing shoes and building my own workshop.
In my ancestors’ former sheepfold near Kraków there are still the old shoemaking machines that helped me make Gucio shoes for years. Some of them remember the years before the war. A few I restored myself and worked at them daily for years.
Perhaps that is why I find it hard to throw anything away.
I look at those machines differently. I see in them not only iron and mechanisms, but time written down, the patience of work and the traces of a human life.
I look at painting in a similar way.
Perfection and the hurry of the modern world interest me less and less. What interests me more and more is the silence of the studio, light falling on an old table, marks of use, the passing of matter and the attempt to save something from being forgotten.
Perhaps that is exactly why, after many years, I came back to painting.
Not to prove anything. Rather to look more calmly.
