A TALK WITH JOANNA STASIAK

PAINTERS THINK WITH A BRUSH IN THEIR HAND

– A TALK WITH JOANNA STASIAK

ART:

What do you think about the way art developed in the 20^th century?

In "Paris in the Twentieth Century," Jules Verne described a city of the future that had functioning cultural institutions, but no art. It's a visionary depiction of things that seemed inconceivable in 1863, when the book was written. He wrote about an artist, one Courbon, who placed himself in a gallery as an exhibit, putting his life and emotions on display instead of an artwork. Elsewhere, Verne describes a concert for seven connected pianos, which the musicians pounded at random with all their might.

What about the art world today?

The tendency I described is now at its peak, so we can hope its decline will come eventually. In 1990, just after graduating, I went to the UK on a scholarship. I remember this scene from a sculpture studio at the Royal Academy of Art. A magnificent sky-lit interior. No models or figures anywhere. Under a tutor's supervision, a final-year student was stacking a pyramid of alternating layers of red velvet cushions and bones fresh from the abattoir. I thought that if they're taking this sort of thing seriously in London now, we'll be doing something similar in Poland for the next twenty years. Now that twenty years have passed, I think that this state, where the artistic intention stands in for the artwork, will last a bit longer. Ten years ago, I found that situation very frustrating, but lately I've managed to reconcile myself to it. But you have to put in some effort if you want a work of art to endure. And it's not a matter of ambition: there's simply a task that has to be done. Maybe someone will manage to leave behind something that will eventually prove our times weren't all that bad. Though Brodsky said that the misery of contemporary art was in itself a prophecy.

Do you revisit the past in your work?

I wouldn't put it that way. For me, tradition is not something that belongs to the past. Piero della Francesca, for instance, is a constant presence: his painting is still topical. His "Baptism of Christ" in the National Gallery has a revelatory power. The body and the tree-trunk shine with a shared glow. Its composition is a product of both observation and vision.

If contemporary painting ever reaches the point of exhaustion, it won't be because there's nothing left to paint, but because our seeing might fail us. Jean Clair says that we see Klein-blue, but we no longer see the blue of the sky. Seeing the world your own way has become very difficult because we live in an aggressive, uniform culture of images. Even students majoring in painting rely mainly on photography: they identify the image of the world with a photograph. They use a technologically processed record instead of trusting their immediate visual perception.

CREATIVE EXPLORATION:

Tell me about your beginnings as an artist.

At art school in Toruń, we had a very large and beautiful studio. I would paint in a corner enclosed by drapes. I felt the need to confine space. I was doing dark paintings back then. I was interested in shallow spaces, like the dark and close interiors of wardrobes, with a solitary figure inside. I worked on the most basic relations of figure and ground. It was the 1980s – Poland was under Martial Law. We felt that the studio was the only place where genuine and independent work was possible.

Are you able to distance yourself from yourself and your work?

I often go to sleep satisfied with what I've done, but then I wake up feeling it came out all wrong. After graduating, I worked on one and the same painting for two years trying to make it perfect. There came a point when I didn't know what I actually wanted anymore. I would paint over warm colours with cold ones. It all kept changing, like a kaleidoscope. It was only when I started working with students that I gained some detachment and learned to judge my paintings more impersonally.

Your paintings are a refletion of your numerous interests and inspirations. Where did your interest in Russian literature come from, for example?

It's thanks to a Russian friend of mine. I would listen to a recording of her reading Brodski's "The Great Elegy for John Donne" over and over again: it's a poem of great inner harmony and power, with no trace of wistfulness. In 1996, I painted a series called "For the Russian Poets." Portraits of Akhmatova, Tsvetayeva, Pasternak, and Mandelstam: poets whose life and work were particularly close to me at the time. I painted from photographs. I wanted their features to be death-masks, a mirror of the face.

Where does the motif of the mirror in your work come from?

Mirrors are everywhere. Even the surface of a lake produces reflections. I have the mirror from van Eyck's "Arnolfini Portrait" as the wallpaper on my computer desktop. For me, mirrors are magical, they are a force that generates order. They show the world on the other side – one that both exists and does not. When I was a child, I used to place a pocket-mirror on the floor. It became a deep well, a reflection of light in the void.

In your works, you invoke religious symbols and associations.

They're present in the figure of the Krzyżmak, for instance. Beams crossed against the sky, like a tilted windmill or a weight pressing down upon a concealed figure. I never had the courage to name or fully define that figure, but I did a lot of variants on the theme. I felt it might be a vehicle allowing me to ask important questions about how space could be transformed and sanctified. It's like that in Warmia, in northeastern Poland, where the presence of crosses is so obvious. There's one by every crossroads. You can't ignore them – they're part of the way you perceive the landscape.

At the most tragic juncture in his life Czesław Miłosz drew on the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice not because of the story it tells but because it contained the truth about himself. It's like that with religion: it contains images called to life by a great human intuition. These images cannot be ignored. They can be read as symbols of human fate that each generation has to discover anew.

Does criticism matter to you?

I have no need to see myself in the opinions of others. Painters have to be left alone with their work. That's the price of staying independent. When I'm doing projects, even as part of my own Galeria In Spe, it's always with a few close people in mind: other painters, my students…

SITES:

How are you affected by places – your studio in the village of Trękus in Warmia for instance?

I respond very strongly to places. It's important to experience how people live. When I go to someone's house, I learn something about the owner's system of values. When I first saw the house in Warmia, I felt I was meeting someone old and distinguished, someone who's always been close to me.

The barn there is extraordinary.

In the first paintings I did there, the light was muted, like fire in congealing lava. Now I'm more interested in harsh light. The barn in Trękus fascinated me: half its interior is bright, the other half is dark. The sun comes in through gaps between the boards and traces beams of light that are focused like lasers.

Trękus is a special place for you.

You get to know a place when you start building it up. That gives you strength. When transforming a site, you get to read the marks that others had left there. For me, building a house is like composing a painting. It's thinking in terms of lines, shapes, and colours. When I was blending pigment with plaster in a concrete mixer to paint the outside, I wanted there to be a slight difference in value between the dun-purple wall and the warmth of the reddish-brown shutters. The layout of the house is fairly typical: it has two axes and there are four rooms with a vestibule running through the middle. In terms of proportion, the rooms are classical elongated quadrangles much like the ones in Greek temples. The windows have been arranged according to the golden mean and moved slightly towards one corner. All this gives me an idea of what the former residents were like: what their sense of measure and proportion was.

WORKING WITH STUDENTS:

Do the art-school students you work with manage to find masters for themselves?

It's very difficult to meet the right painter, but if you do, it can restore your faith in masters. Personally, I draw strength from Janusz Kaczmarski's paintings. When most painters invoke the past, it’s usually through quotes, little tricks, and techniques like scumbling that are meant to recall early painting. There's none of that in Kaczmarski's work. Instead there's a dialogue. If I'm talking to a student, the names of artists close to me, like Hopper or Piero della Francesca, will always come up. But everybody has to choose their own master.

Are the young people you work with artistically gifted?

Being gifted also means being ready to take on a task. I never understood it when people said someone was "gifted but lazy." So-called artistic talent is very common. They say that sixty percent of the population has talent.

What's your opinion of art-teaching today? Does it have any tasks to perform?

I work from the premise that students need to be taught to have the strength to resist prevailing fashions. They should also understand which way I want to direct them and agree to go there. I do this by showing them the complexity of contemporary art. I show them the various choices they have. I show them who I am, the place I'm at, and how I arrived there. I care about helping them realise that different works can address the same artistic problems. We look at Warhols to understand how a painting is constructed. Warhol uses contour and a shape that goes outside the contour. I want students to notice the same problem at work when they're looking at Ancient Egyptian painting; I want them to understand how much you gain when the shape doesn't neatly fit inside the contours, as it does in colouring books, but stays free, has breathing space. I want to give them tools with which they can solve their own problems. Then they'll be aware of the existing rules, which can be broken as long as one knows what they are. Igor Stravinsky wrote in "The Poetics of Music" that whatever removes our obstacles takes away our strength. For example, it’s a very rigorous task if you limit yourself to making only horizontal or vertical brushstrokes, but the outcome can be surprising and help you discover something new. That's what's magnificent about art. The discipline we impose on ourselves doesn't limit us in the least. We get messed up when everything's permitted, and the only goal is self-expression. Basically, all of us start out with the banal. Pictures of the imagination are so predictable.

That's a very responsible role you've taken on.

I've accustomed my students to brutal candour, to being able to look critically at your work and not feel that you're a failure.

Do you have to be candid?

It's indispensable if you want to get rid of unnecessary weight, but also not to lose faith in yourself. A teacher has to teach students how to manage their own work. Painting is awfully difficult. You do a lot of stupid things, then you have to back away from them while preserving what matters most: your convictions and self-confidence. A completed painting is the best record of that journey.

How important is teaching for you as an artist? Apart from giving, do you get something out of it for yourself?

I ask myself and my students the same questions. The "Shards of Atlantis – The Shrines of Warmia" project was interesting because it helped us define our attitude to contemporary art and culture in general. Is it possible to paint a contemporary Pieta? I think that refusing to tackle such subjects today means cutting yourself off from the tradition of painting. Why do artists who make installations and stage happenings address these symbols, but painters avoid doing so, because they don't want to be suspected of being illustrative and anachronistic? True painting has always been intimately and profoundly connected with human fate. Why is it cutting itself off from that lifeline today?

Can you say something about your process during the workshop for the project and the plein-air symposium in Klebark Wielki?

It was a continuation of previous activities. But this time, I wasn't alone with my students: I had the support of a team of artists and theorists. Before the plein-air, I spent some time working in Warsaw with my students. We looked for contemporary takes on the Pieta motif: from Bacon's butcher shop crucifixions, through Balthus's iconoclastic "The Guitar Lesson." Before I showed the paintings, we watched videos and looked at photos where the motif was present. I felt that assigning students such a task directly would make them reject it as being gratuitous and scholarly. Our work together, the conversations we had, the actual paintings, and the things that time gave me personally, make that project one of my most important experiences.

WORKING ON THE PAINTING:

Is it easy for you to talk about your paintings?

I'd say that once you start talking about a painting, that painting already exists; you paint when you don't know everything yet. Painting is a thought process, a form of learning. It brings you more in touch with your intuition. Not an intuition that stems from the painting itself, but a kind of associative thinking.

Did you and professor Kaczmarski consult each other's work? What was that like?

Looking at paintings and talking about them was a big part of our life together. We painted in studios across the hall from each other, and at night each of us would go over and see what the other had done. Janusz had perfect pitch. One word from him could change the direction in which my work was going. I felt free to discuss his paintings, but refrained from making any suggestions. Janusz set himself unimaginably difficult tasks as a painter, and he carried them out in surprising ways. I remember one of his last paintings, which he spent months working on but never completed. It was a self-portrait that he repainted every day. Each time around, he had a new compositional idea that tied all the elements together with inner threads. One adjustment would set everything in motion and changed the whole picture. I regret not setting up a camera on a tripod every evening to take photos of the day's progress. It would have been a record of an immense intellectual effort.

JOURNEY TO INDIA

It seems that for you painting is just as important as breathing.

On my second day in New Delhi, I was already painting on the roof. I didn't give myself much time. There's this pleasant feeling of being tired when painting. I like the physical work painting requires: it gives life a rhythm. Additionally, when I start painting, I start thinking. It seems to me that painters think best with a brush in their hand.

What images did you bring back from your trip to India?

I think back to my work-space in India: an empty concrete roof with a view of the street below, a vegetable vendor pulling a cart on wooden wheels. The sound of voices, a lilting cry, people's laundry and faded Tibetan prayer flags moving in the wind, temples, narrow dirty streets, cats, dogs, and goats in coats. It's only twelve degrees there in February. I wasn't ready for all those sensations. Brodsky said that the eye should be faster than the pen. In India, the eye really does overtake the mind. Delhi is a splendid city. It was foggy when I arrived. You couldn't see the city. All through my stay it all felt like a mirage, even though the place is so densely populated, so intensely alive. The fog and dust make things in the background – the monuments and architecture – irrelevant, just backdrops for the people. If it weren't for the excursion to Buddhist temples, I'd have come back with nothing but vivid colourful images of people.

There were no tourists in Aurangabad when we were there. It's extraordinary to cross an arid mountain landscape on a hot day and reach a chamber with ideal proportions and geometry carved out in the rock. There, ordered human thought leads to the Buddha. Then one follows his gaze back to the landscape from which one had come.

Entering from the light, we cast a shadow on a statue of the Buddha. When we reach the third step, the shadow of our head is outlined on the Buddha's chest.

There was also another site you visited.

Ajanta is an elliptical valley in the mountains, with a huge temple complex. There are caves hewn in basalt. Magnificent polychrome paintings have survived. Looking at Indian polychromes, at the subtle shadow painted on the Buddha's face, I realised how magnificent the painted statues of Ancient Greece must have been. In a grey landscape, a band of intense ochres above the entrance to the temple makes us more receptive to the idea of colourful Doric temples.

In "Hermits and Demons" Ryszard Przybylski wrote about early Christian hermits who fled from the world and from matter. Years later, they would find that matter within themselves. They brought what they were fleeing from to the desert with them. Indian caves were lived in by monks immersed in the tradition of asceticism and renunciation who were surrounded by the entire sensual world. This polarity is at the heart of religion, and of art as well. That's the way the world is arranged. You have asceticism on the one hand, and sensuality on the other: it's like light and darkness. You need sound to hear the silence. In Ajanta I thought about Caravaggio, about "The Crucifixion of Saint Peter": the dirty feet of the henchman, his back bent under the weight.

SILK:

You've recently expanded your technique to include painting on silk. What happens when you pick up your brush?

I first started painting on silk in India. A monkey would come along and grab a tube of paint, or sit down next to me and watch me work. Now my kitten, Alma, stands in for a herd of monkeys. She puts her paws into bowls of pigment and wants to paint, too. Painting on silk gave me new assistants. I work with the silk stretched taut on the ground. It's like the dance that Pollock did. The paintings are large. You have to walk around them. Often you have to step on them to see them from all angles. Top and bottom are reversed, like they are in the alchemical process.

What does this technique mean to you?

Silk is a seductive fabric. It has a sheen, it conjures up associations with the decorative, the feminine element; it's old-fashioned somehow, it denies its materiality. But I don't want to let it stay on the side of lightness. I try not to give in to that picturesque spilling-over of paint. By adding circles and borders, I tame the spilling shapes in an attempt to have an orderly composition.

You're working with silk in your Warsaw studio now.

There is a link between the paintings on silk I did at Jaipur Estate in Delhi, and the ones I do in Warsaw or in Trękus. I think that Jung's concept of archetypal memory is still valid. It might be possible to discover the sources of that memory through paintings on silk. I'm not treating that experience as something distinct from my previous work. I believe that the medium is important, but whether you work on grey paper or on silk, it's always about one thing, and that is draughtsmanship and colour.

Thank you for the conversation.

Taken down by Magdalena Janota Bzowska