PAINTER ANNA SŁAWKOWSKA-RODE
in conversation with Angelika Eliasz
You chose design even though you felt that painting was your calling. Don’t you regret those years?
Absolutely not! I graduated from the Faculty of Design and it was a conscious choice. Youth called for a wide field of activity, and design naturally opened up such a field. In it, I saw a very diverse range of possibilities to operate with form, color, space, and also undertake activities of an interdisciplinary nature. The sum of these potentialities was a great challenge for my imagination.I studied and then worked as an assistant in Professor Jacek Damięcki’s studio, which was both eye-opening and provided an opportunity to creatively develop the concept of design outlined by Stanisław Zamecznik. I still find these lines of thinking close to me.
And today you are a role model for young artists.
Contact with young artists and their sensitivity is a fantastic source of inspiration. I hope that we influence each other in this way. Each new generation shapes its time in a way that is both unique and spontaneous. I enjoy watching this and, in a way, participating in it, contributing my own experience, both in design and from my intuitions as a painter.
However, painting has won out over design.
In a sense. Since graduating from the Academy, where I studied painting under Prof. Rajmund Ziemski, I’ve never abandoned my need to paint. For many years of my practice, design and painting have been interconnected. At the same time, however, painting provided a certain counterpoint to design. A painting emerges through an unpredictable interaction with the painter, it cannot be designed, while a design vision can always be painted. Design also refers to three-dimensional spaces that we experience directly, while painting, in spite of being two-dimensional, paradoxically becomes a field of exploration of unknown spaces, new realities.My gradual shift of attention towards painting was an intentional narrowing down of a wide range of activities in favor of deepening the chosen field. It was also a process of withdrawal from numerous external demands determined by the necessary compromises, which was accompanied by a greater openness to growing internal needs. For me, the ultimate reason for committing to painting was the total independence of creative experiments offered by the medium – this was the decisive factor.
The world of design ceased to exist for you?
On the contrary, I’m vitally interested in this discipline, although from a greater distance today. If I become involved in a design project, it’s mainly on the conceptual level. My activity in design currently focuses on the didactic aspect of the studio I run. The essence of my creative experiments with students is communicative materialization of the emerging ideas. It’s realized through the creation of artistic forms by finding the optimal relations between its components. The natural coherence in the composition delineates an area of explicit dialogue between design and painting.
You once said that painting is solitude. How do you understand this?
Working on a painting is different from design work, which is typically associated with cooperation with other people or institutions. A painter is completely alone in the face of the encountered problems. Painting is a deeply internal experience.
In a nutshell, what experiences accompany you while painting? What do your thoughts revolve around?
It’s difficult to name specific feelings. What I manage to paint is most often impossible to express in words. Painting is a pursuit, a path. One could possibly risk a reflection concerning the direction of this pursuit. However effusive it may sound, the goal is always to get closer to the Mystery, the essence of our being and the world.
Hence your fascination with travel, exoticism, other cultures and civilizations? The need to learn about the world?
To a large extent, yes. This curiosity about the world was awakened in me by my father, a filmmaker who brought back rich documentation, trophies and stories from every distant expedition. I watched as all of it – faraway landscapes, nature, art – breathed a rhythm different from the one I knew. It was this rhythm that imperceptibly became the key to recognizing the peculiarities of climates, situations and places. Since childhood I’ve been most fascinated by Africa. Over time, I began to travel there myself. There, the primordial rhythm of nature, permeating everything like the beating of a drum, can be felt most strongly.
The rhythm of the world?
Yes, in the end everything that surrounds us represents some kind of rhythm or can be expressed as rhythm. Rhythm determines the structure of life, its pulse, movement, variability, evanescence or cyclicality. At the beginning, my paintings referred to the visual rhythm of space, in a way spying on it from within their frames; they were often titled “fields of vision.” Today, I’d call my work a search for the inner essence of Nature, a code, a kind of DNA, maybe even an “algo-RHYTHM.”
Rhythmicity is the common denominator of all your works. It’s perceptible…
… because it has become a criterion for my discovering, sensing and recording of various manifestations of reality. Its type is a formula for increasingly speculative spaces and worlds.
What are your series about, then? An attempt to touch on a particular phenomenon from different sides?
Largely, yes. By juxtaposing and adding up different aspects of things, I try to grasp a hypothetical Whole. In my series, two powerful opposites meet and complement each other: movement and stillness. Movement occurs between the individual depictions, it is represented by the openness of the constantly transforming rhythm. Stillness is contained in the frozen sequence – a moment (or is it eternity?).
What role does color play in relation to the rhythm?
It constitutes its counterbalance. Being derived from conventional notation, rhythm has a conceptual, intellectual basis. Color, on the other hand, constitutes a quality that refers to our sensuality. These two inseparable factors – intellect and sensuality – are locked in a dynamic, mobile configuration, both in life and in art.
How important, in your opinion, is the viewer’s contact with the work of art?
Some kind of confrontation is necessary. By creating a work, the artist sends a certain “message” – it’s important that it can be received in some way. The viewer or recipient contributes an additional relationship in contact with the work. Their interpretation adds considerable value to the functioning of the work – it brings it to life again!
One frame from your life…
The countryside… It’s such a small big world. It restores balance. It helps me to see the Whole in the detail. It also brings out in me the feeling that I have not only a piece of land, but also my own piece of heaven. Paradoxically, the farthest journey is possible in the most familiar of all places. Such “cosmic” travels allow us to calmly return to our proper frame – our everyday life.
„W rytmie świata”[“In the rhythm of the world”] , Residencies, March-April 2009