“My painting went through different phases”, Halima Nałęcz would say in 1992 commenting on her artistic output standing in front of a stretched canvas in her studio with a view on the sea in Brighton. “In the 1950s — she continued — I was an abstract painter. There were very few artists like that in London at that time. It was obviously because of the inspiration of Denise René from Paris and because of the influence of my Professor Henri Closon59 [member of La Nouvelle École de Paris]. Then there was time for evolution and a change of style, which was stimulated by the School of Marian Bohusz, whose influence became superimposed on my previous experience from the studio of Professor Michał Rouba [from Vilnius]. However, it took me as many as 30 years to create my own style. The very fact that I do not sign my paintings means that they are immediately recognizable. Anyway, I want my paintings to have their own life and not to be static or academic. I never imitated nature — I interpreted nature. I worked on colour, texture and rhythm — painting must have its own rhythm”.

A description and evaluation of one’s own work in words like that fully reflects all aspects of the artistic output, the result of a half‑century’s work, of one of the most attractive and fascinating figures of the Polish artistic world in London after WW II. In the rich documentation of the exhibitions of the works by Halima Nałęcz, both those organized in the Drian Galleries and those from other exhibition centres within Great Britain or outside its borders where Nałęcz would present her work, we can find many critical assessments of her painting, which are in accordance with the opinion of art critic and painter at the same time Stanisław Frenkiel, who would share his view on her painting at various occasions. In 1992 he said the following words about the artistic output of the Polish painter: “Nałęcz changed her style a few times. She started as an abstract painter, then she returned to figurative art. However, one thing remained always unchanged — her remarkable sensitivity to colour and the ability to arrange composition according to the absolutely finest rules of decorative painting”.

The fascination with abstract painting, which had a strong impact on Halima Nałęcz in the middle of the 1950s seems to be a natural reaction to art for a young painter who returned to the world of art and found her place within the new and developing artistic life of the capital of Great Britain. This return is even more significant in the context of her difficult experiences connected with, among other things, her work in the spinning‑house in Manchester and an escape from there.

At the beginning of the 1950s, Nałęcz would discover anew, not only British but also European post‑war artistic circles, which turned out to be much different in their essence from pre‑war fashions and tendencies in Polish and European painting, which she knew so well. Undoubtedly, Paris and especially the contact with Jean Henri Closon exerted a profound influence on an as‑yet artistically inexperienced painter. The capital of France was still, next to New York, the largest centre of modern art at that time and undoubtedly that was the best place for Halima Nałęcz to familiarize herself with the newest achievements of, among others, abstract expressionism, art informel or — being at its peak at that time — tashisme. However, as it soon turned out, at the very beginning of her artistic career the Polish artist was closer in her tastes to those creators who worked within geometric abstraction. Still, almost immediately and with increasing strength, in the paintings by Nałęcz one would discover fascinations with expressionism and tachisme. A retrospective exhibition of the paintings of Piet Mondrian, organized with considerable effort in the Paris gallery of Denise René, remained not without significance for the ‘abstract stage’ in her painting. This exhibition was organized by the French gallery owner precisely on the first anniversary of the opening of Halima Nałęcz’s Drian Galleries.

Paulina Laskowska, the author of an unpublished dissertation about the Drian Galleries, is right in assuming that during her stay in Paris, the fascination of Halima Nałęcz with abstract art was an expression of her psychological condition influenced by wartime exile and hard work in industrial institutions in northern Britain. Hence it was in art that Halima Nałęcz found a certain refuge from brutal realities. As Paul Klee would say, the more brutal the world, the more abstract the art, while those who are happy create the art rooted in the earth62. The abstract paintings by Nałęcz, which were created between 1953 and 1963, are marked undoubtedly with a need for recording personal and deeply individual experiences of the artist, through the means of expression that she created herself. Geometric, mostly flat divisions of the canvas surface into regular and less regular geometric figures assuming most often the shapes of squares, rectangles, lozenges or triangles were, in the words of the artist herself, an attempt at finding her own ‘style’ through conscious inspiration drawn from the achievements of European (continental) contemporary art, which she was simply enthralled with. And even though, at that time, Halima Nałęcz was far from the fascination with nature and the environment, which awaited her in the future, it can be easily observed that the artist’s abstract compositions created at the turn of the 1950s and 60s started to betray her great love for colour, as a result of the influence of her pre‑war ‘Vilnius school’. Initially filling separate flat geometric sections on the canvas, the colour would ‘develop’ and cover spaces creating an increasingly distinct texture, in which one can feel the artist’s individual sensitivity to the very experience of colour, which is so undeniably unique a feature of her creative work.

The decisive brush‑strokes, the clearly tangible texture of the paint spread with a dynamic hand seem to be suggestive of the impact of the school of Marian Bohusz‑Szyszko, for whom it was primarily the expressive voice together with painting freedom that constituted the essence of artistic expression. This emanation of energy in the logical and geometric compositions in Halima Nałęcz’s early paintings was noticed also by her English colleagues. The work of Halima Nałęcz from the 1950s Denis Bowen would perceive in 1973 in the following way: “I remember her paintings. I was struck by their vitality and energy. The colour was sharp and intense. The expressiveness was pervasive both in the way of spreading the paint and in the artistic imagination that must have drawn from the surrounding environment. Some of the canvases were a large size, contrary to the fashion prevalent in Europe at that time. They had a lot in common with the large paintings of American expressive abstractionists, who later influenced the younger generation to a large degree”. Neither can one disregard the opinion of Krystyna Fabijańska‑Przybytko [although it would be difficult to prove it] who after learning about the work of Halima Nałęcz in her own studio, at the beginning of the 1980s, wrote that in her early compositions one can discern “Slavic motifs intertwined with oriental elements, which must have been inspired by her wartime travels through Turkey, Egypt (she saw the Valley of the Kings and Luxor) and the Middle East”.

The first years of the 1960s are marked by the symptoms of a change in the way Nałęcz understood painting, which can be traced in the painting compositions she created at that time. And even though Halima’s closest colleagues, like for instance Denis Bowen, quoted above, concentrated fully on abstract painting, she was the very first one to perceive, also in the work of artists she presented in her gallery, that there was an increasingly high potential in the painting of new figuration.

One could venture a claim that Halima Nałęcz in some intuitive way was ahead of the main stream of development in European art, which took place in the 1970s. This development consisted in the decline of “the attractiveness of attitudes and tendencies preferring the cult of novelty and progress, together with the secular and homocentric model of culture. In the place of radical analytical, constructivist principles and modernism aiming at separating art from life there appeared more and more examples — also in her pictures — of the tendency to endow art with existential and emotional meaning”.

Halima Nalecz- Discovery of Nature and the Four Seasons Violet and turquoise, Salmon and strawberry, Furry brown and grassy green, The blues of ice, hyacinths and the sky, The yellows of a sunflower and of a lion’s mane. Max Wykes‑Joyce, “Arts Review” 1971, 13 March.

The discovery of new creative inspirations, derived directly from nature and the environment surrounding the artist, initiated a new stage in the creative activities of Halima Nałęcz, which came to be known as early as the mid 1960s among English art critics as ‘Rediscovery of Nature’. This new quality in the paintings of the Polish artist came to the surface after ten years of her fascination with abstract art, which was presented to the general public for the first time at an individual exhibition at the Walker’s Gallery in Bond Street in 1956. As we know, apart from the works close to geometric abstractionism, her paintings from that time would contain elements of expressive abstractionism and, most of all, her work was unique in her sensitivity to colour, which would “explode on the canvas in fountains and geysers of paint in bright tones of blues and pinks”. A dynamic change, both in terms of her working methods and thematic content of her paintings, occurred about 1956. It was at that time that Halima Nałęcz recognized a chance for developing her own style and a chance for complete artistic fulfilment. She consciously extended her interests from the narrow territory of abstract art, which defined her area of work from the beginning of her career, towards new broad possibilities of an art filled with narrative elements and figurative motifs.

The decision to change her style was a conscious decision, and (apart from some foreshadowing of future changes in the period of her fascination with abstract art) one can say that it was a very radical one. As if in one move, the artist departed from the compositions in abstract geometry, which she enjoyed so much. In the second half of the 1950s, her attention was increasingly drawn towards nature, although for many years, as if parallel to her fascinations with themes closely connected with the surrounding world of nature, Halima Nałęcz found fulfilment in various forms of expressionism. This can be clearly seen especially in her large canvases, which would explode with dynamic, passionate, intense energy of a distinctly expressionistic character. The character of her paintings seems to clearly show the background of her fascination with abstract art through the influences of the established masters of European abstract expressionism. Finally, at the end of the 1960s, after a complete rejection of all previous borrowings and shades, derived especially from her French experiences of abstract geometric art, the new paintings by Halima Nałęcz acquired a very personal and unique character.

The first London manifestation68 of the new stage in the painting of Halima Nałęcz was the exhibition of 39 oils organized in 1967 by the London Ewan Phillips Gallery. The paintings presented at this exhibition, as Alicja Drwęska wrote, “radiate poetry, somewhat naïve, somewhat childish, delight with beautiful colour, as if of a female quality, but also of intense and deep tones. At the exhibition there is an atmosphere of serenity, smile and eternal spring: exotic countries, full of bouquet‑trees resembling flowers in folklore jigsaw puzzles, charming jungles inhabited by mysterious human‑creatures, animals half real and half fantastic, ponies, ducks, turtles, butterflies, marvellous tropical birds. These landscapes from fairytales, from naïve dreams of childhood, which always remain asleep in the subconscious and which the artist managed to bring back to life with the magic of her art; they all emanate with light and fluctuate with gentle rhythm. The landscapes are embraced by the warm azures of the sky, by ultramarine of the evening, by the reds and golds of dawn and dusk. They sing the beauty of nature, but there is also a discernible trace of nostalgia for the lost paradise of childhood, the longing for a reality more beautiful than human life. The painting of Halima Nałęcz unites in itself the charm of naivety, simplicity and sophistication”.

The turn of the 1960s and 70s brought with itself an extraordinary outburst of artistic activity on the part of Halima Nałęcz, but it was not until a little later in her professional career that a real explosion of her creative potential came to stimulate her work. The paintings done at that time, called by Stanisław Frenkiel “the period of mature style” of the artist, were always about “mysterious gardens”. “These gardens were not taken from books on botany or biology, but there are some strange plants, which are nowhere to be found on the earth, which are filled with busy and uncanny animals. Her compositions preserve the harmony of the painting surface — that is Halima Nałęcz would never leave colour(less) gaps in her paintings. Everything holds together, and this is for her the most important quality in the painting”.

Today, when we compare and analyse all the works created over the period of professional involvement of the artist, it transpires that the paintings from the period of her attraction to nature automatically, as if of themselves, define their place on the line of development of her painting experience. They are all individual compositions, carefully considered in terms of their content and decorative edge, and most of all, which should be specifically emphasized, they are filled with a whole range of details and nuances. This sphere is an integral part of exotic forests with their mysterious insides vibrating with independent lives and is filled with enlarged (as if under a microscope) fragments, and with buoyant, half‑European and half‑Amazon flora, being a natural habitat for the whole array of animals and birds, which found a safe haven in her painting.

This fascination with nature, which the artist would find in her vicinity, for instance in London’s Hyde Park, which was a short distance from the location of the Drian Galleries, were central to her art. Her regular daily walks in the park, which were her habit for over 40 years, and her memories of a childhood spent in the Vilnius region would become integrated in her mind and then transferred onto the canvas. This love for nature, fascination with various species, interest in the flora and fauna found a realization in a large, almost fairytale garden surrounding the estate of the Nałęcz family on the outskirts of London in Milland, which they cultivated with the utmost care. This garden as if from a dream, full of innumerable species of trees, shrubs, multi‑season and single‑season flowers, was not only an oasis of peace and a place for rest for Halima, but it would also bring back the memories of a childhood spent at the Eastern Outskirts, at the Polish eastern frontier, which the artist had to leave in 1940.

“I was born in a beautiful place — the artists remembered — full of marvellous colours. It stayed with me for my whole life. Remembering that I always search for similar places. I evoke those colours. It is not an accident that they are to be found in my paintings […] I consider my paintings as part of nature and I want them to speak to the observer not only with colour. My intention is that my paintings could be seen and heard at the same time”.

Close contact with the paintings of Halima Nałęcz, full of wonderful secrets and impregnated with a rich palette of colours inspired by nature, can evoke in the observers a charm similar to that experienced by the painter, which is pointed out by Pierre Rouve, who says that one day Halima Nałęcz must have woken up under a spell, looking through masses of air towards light, flowers and birds, towards a finer world than ours, where only in winter it seems that each grove is visited by spirits73. This wonderland would grow in Halima for years. It is her ‘secret garden’, which she never leaves. It is a garden of psychological recovery, in which we can unexpectedly find half‑grotesque, half‑fantastic animals and birds living among exuberant and entangled vegetation.

A rich palette of colours, which Nałęcz would spread over canvas in an expressive but, which should be strongly emphasized, methodical way, is strengthened in many compositions by superimposed and juxtaposed layers of colours which complement one another on the surface of the canvas. In many parts of the artist’s works one can find an abundance of contrasts, especially in fragments where from the density of dark green ‘interiors’ there appear both wild and domesticated animals in yellow, red, violet or brown shades. Cats and mongrel dogs feel in the imaginary space of forests, meadows and home gardens created by the artist as comfortable as an ordinary blackbird or a noble woodpecker.

After the success at the Ewan Philips Gallery, Halima Nałęcz decided to present her works in her own Drian Galleries, ten years after the inaugural exhibition there. In August 1967 fifty paintings by Halima Nałęcz were hung on the walls of the gallery at Porchester Place. The artist entitled her exhibition exactly as she had before: Rediscovery of Nature75. It was a presentation which initiated the most prolific stage in the artistic career of Halima Nałęcz. The year 1970 brought a new title for an individual exhibition of the paintings by Halima Nałęcz in the Drian Galleries: The Four Seasons76, about which Max Wykes‑Joyce wrote that apart from the theme of the four seasons, which on the artist’s large canvases is expressed in groups of flowers, trees, animals and birds, what is equally important is the colour, which is subtle and harmonious, with many shades of violet, turquoise, salmon and strawberry, with the browns of fur and the greens of grass, with the blues of ice, hyacinth and a summer sky, with the yellows of sunflowers and a lion’s mane. It is in these colours that Nałęcz returned to her family home, vibrant with singing and music, in the Vilnius region.

For her next individual exhibition a year later in March 1971, her seventh in London and third in the Drian Galleries, Halima Nałęcz selected 29 oil compositions and gouaches and 10 drawings. The exhibition received many favourable reviews and the London “Arts Review” magazine used eight colour reproductions by Halima Nałęcz for its front cover80. Three months later one of her canvases won the bronze medal at a painting exhibition organized by the Museum of Fine Arts in Ostend and at an auction in a London auction house one of her works Christie went to enrich the collection of an anonymous buyer and the money from this transaction Halima Nałęcz granted to help refugees from East Pakistan. This good fortune was to remain with the artist for the whole time.

In July 1972, at the 15th anniversary of the opening of the Drian Galleries, Halima Nałęcz organized a large exhibition of her works, in which she presented 28 oil compositions and 10 gouaches, which provided further proof that “despite the tremendous effort which is necessary in managing a gallery, despite a constant lack of time, the artist did not abandon her own painting. On the contrary, her talent developed and literally blossomed […] The fifteenth anniversary of the opening of the gallery was rightly celebrated with an exhibition of works by its owner. The paintings exhibited in the Drian blossom and sing with colour. They charm the audience with joy of life, with beauty, with poetry of naïve vision, full of grace and imagination […] The atmosphere of the exhibition spreads in front of the audience an aura of optimism, peace and harmony. And a Polish observer will find in this joyful melody a note of nostalgia because in these exotic landscapes, in these jungles of fantastically blossoming flowers one can hear distant, but still distinct, echoes of Polish folklore.

In the preface to the catalogue of her next exhibition presented in March 1973, Denis Bowen wrote not only about Polish sources of inspiration, but also about Halima’s wide perspective of perceiving nature. He says that each painting by Halima Nałęcz is different from the previous one. He believes that it is a very original art, which is impossible to imitate both in the general form and in the brushstrokes. In the 1960s this magical world, which could be that of Alice in Wonderland, became filled with a procession of dancing animals, fish, birds, plants and flowers, pulsating and vibrating with unrestrained energy.

The opening of this exhibition, in the words of Cezary Wędrowski, “was a triumph. Many paintings of the largest sizes were sold, and the artist received very high praise from the audience. The ground floor and the first‑floor of the gallery changed into a flowery garden of extraordinarily intense colours. More than fifty paintings and several drawings under the heading Walking the Park85 gave a thorough overview of the artistic output of Halima Nałęcz between 1963 and 1973”.

A similarly enthusiastic tone in relation to representation of parks by Halima Nałęcz one can find in the opinion of Polish artist and art critic Alicja Drwęska, who knows her work very well: “The thematic content of Halima’s painting is still the same: imaginary landscapes shining with bright juxtapositions of colours, blossoming with astonishing bouquets of trees and flowers, and in this jungle growing out of the artist’s imagination one can spot various examples of grotesque fauna. It might seem that those flowers, birds, cats and dogs would appear to be sentimental and banal, but they are not. These fairytale childish visions are so rich in multiple colour shades and their texture is so ornate and sophisticated that their thematic content becomes almost unimportant”.

Parks and ‘secret gardens’ remained Halima’s most important themes in her painting also in subsequent years of her artistic career. However, since the late 1970s, the artist’s work underwent slow modifications, which were not necessarily easily discernible. Her gardens ‘calmed down’ and started to bloom with different species of plants, “as if because of a change of seasons or climate conditions; the sun is muffled by the fog and the light seems sprayed through mist and vapours, which create a unique tonal glow, reducing colour schemes to homogenous structures dominated by one tone. These paintings can be easily compared to musical compositions written in one tonality: there are etudes, scherzi and sonatas, but there are no operas or oratories. The music of those paintings is reminiscent of a pastoral, and at the same time, presents a brilliantly executed orchestration and instrumentation”. This stage in the life of the artist brings to mind also her earliest, smaller compositions from the period of her fascination with geometric abstractionism. On canvases significantly smaller in size than she would traditionally use and in place of fluid fibre‑like shapes one can notice “sharply drawn edges through which Halima’s paintings acquired greater compactness as if through geometric scaffolding. The colour — brave, saturated even to the point of brutality — has become the essence of these paintings. The compositions of gardens are intensely sensual and carefree, presenting the world of animal‑plants of anti‑naturalistic morphology out of this world, where multi‑petal flowers bare their teeth and small animals ostentatiously blossom”. It is difficult to resist Stanisław Frenkiel’s suggestion that her works from that period brought Halima “close to the gates of surrealism”.

This is the way through which Halima Nałęcz returned to her pre‑war family home, even though it was in a “different costume”. This time it was a return full of music, which she connected with memories of nature from her childhood homeland. The closest musical associations that her paintings evoke are musical compositions of Szymanowski or Debussy, which communicate echoes and reverberate realities rather than images”.

The painting of Halima Nałęcz, as Stanisław Frenkiel says, “does not contain ideological manifestoes and does not try to teach anybody anything. It is creation for its own sake, without any obligations. This is the root of its calm strength and trust in independence of forms, which show the world of flowery nature, where small animals dart to and for playing hide‑and‑seek with invisible birds playing the flutes. Nałęcz is unique in the history of Polish art, which was always abundant in rhetorical exercises. She expresses herself in a consciously limited form and a freely chosen discipline of structure and imagination”.

“The art of Halima Nałecz — in the opinion of another critic Krystyna Fabijańska‑Przybytko dealing with the work of the Polish artist in the 1980s, at the time of her exhibition at the National Museum in Gdańsk — is situated at the boundary between two spheres which interpenetrate each other. The first sphere refers to the ‘anecdotal’ side, which is the area of experiences connected with beauty. The starting point here is rooted in the motifs inspired by nature and fascinations with processes occurring in nature. The second sphere starts where nature undergoes transformation, consisting in a metamorphosis into a new system of forms, suggestive of a new meaning. This sphere cannot be named or described as it belongs to the very essence of artistic expression and in this way it requires individual reception. The paintings by Halima Nałęcz filled almost entirely with gardens, flowers, trees, fields and meadows seem like a projection of imagination inspired by landscapes remembered from childhood. Thus nature, which is prevalent in her work, combines in itself ‘anecdotal’ features, namely through its exuberance, reverberating spirit and primeval element, together with a poetic tone and maybe even a touch of melancholy. In the work of the artist the crucial role is played by the colour palette. The amazingly colourful orchestration results in a decorative effect. It is strengthened by the vibration of contours, an entangled arabesque of lines, the mobility of colourful smudges which describe the forms through the way they are flatly applied to the canvas — without entering the so‑called third dimension.

This colourfulness does not apply to shades and half‑shades, inevitable in the rendering of spatial depth. As a rule, Halima creates an open system and the frames of the canvas only delineate a fragment of a larger, epic whole. The stage of the exposition is usually set in the foreground. Each painting becomes a ‘fresh’ creation, impossible to copy or imitate. The form and tapestry texture are the defining factors here”92. After forty years spent in London, when each new painting seemed to adhere to the long established canons of artistic vision which the artist defined over the years, Halima Nałęcz yielded to new creative inspirations. This time it was the influence of the new place of living, the seaside town Brighton, where she resided from 1986 till 2005. The windows of the apartment bought by the artist offered a splendid view onto the sea, which in contrast to the hustle and bustle of London streets provided the artist with a feeling of peace and tranquillity. The new landscape, new surroundings, new aesthetic experiences could not appear without finding a reflection in Halima’s work. The oils by Halima Nałęcz created in Brighton, even though still filled with a multiplicity of birds hidden among dense branches of trees and entangled foliage of unnaturally large flowers, started to emanate a new colour tonality oscillating more and more often around various shades of azure, blue or even cold violet. This colour tonality refers to the way the artist perceived the horizon combining the ever changing hues of the sea with dynamic shades of the sky at different moments of the day and at different seasons. Symmetry and poise, visible in the distant horizon separating the water and the sky, would also appear in the Brighton seaside compositions by the Polish artist. “This symmetry — Paulina Laskowska says — is underlined by figurative elements, like for instance in the painting Courtship, where two stylized birds standing en face mark the main vertical line and the background is arranged in streaks of colour, emphasizing the structure of the composition. The plants from time to time assume a natural, identifiable appearance, like for example, mallow or agave in the Steps. Apart from that, one could discern a greater simplicity, especially in clearing the foreground of dense plants, which resulted in a new quality of peace and gentleness”.

In the last years of the previous century, in the light of research conducted by art historians with the aim of recovering for the Polish history of art the work of various Polish artists who dispersed all over the world after WW II, the painting by Halima Nałęcz with her own stylistics seems to a large degree to be a unique and very individual phenomenon. However, it cannot be obviously seen without taking into account the weight of experiences and inspirations which contributed to the development of this phenomenon. In the words of Paulina Laskowska, the artist’s biographer, from the formal side, in the artistic output of Halima Nałęcz created over the span of more than fifty years, one can without doubt find “both similarities with Polish colorism and generally with art informel and, to some degree, some echoes of folklore. The idealized images of nature in her paintings are surrounded by exotic aura. For us this exotic feature is familiar and recognizable, as it is rendered through cheerful colours. In the stylization of fantastic flowers one can discover (maybe only through associations) echoes of Polish jigsaw puzzles”.

The evaluation and opinion on the work by Halima Nałęcz quoted above must be supplemented with a comment on the clearly present and very significant fascination of the artist with spontaneity of artistic expression in the choice of artistic method, which trait would bring her close, in many of her works, to creators of European abstract expressionism. Already the very names of her masters, Marian Bohusz‑Szyszko and Jean Henri Closon, who taught her the skill and the method of expressionistic painting, define her artistic stance both in terms of methodical principles or mannerism, and in terms of the philosophy of art in general. Yet in critical studies on 20th century art created in Great Britain one can find some other attempts at defining the category of the artistic output of Halima Nałęcz, which cannot be disregarded. Apart from others, Eric Lister and Sheldon Williams, in their important study on British modern art Twentieth Century British Naïve and Primitive Artists96, included the artistic output of the owner of the Drian Galleries among ‘naïve’ artists. It should be strongly emphasized that her painting evidently escapes such clear‑cut definitions. The most important aspect, as it seems, in our attempt at describing and evaluating the work of Halima Nałęcz is the opinion of the artist herself about the art she created for more than half a century. During the recording of the film Halima Nałęcz w krainie czarów, she said in her Brighton studio: “If I paint — everything else ceases to exist, there is only the painting and me. Sometimes the painting is done in 20 minutes, sometimes it is difficult to finish it in three years. But the paintings created spontaneously are the best. My attitude to painting consists in total, complete involvement in the work. I painted peaceful pictures because I believe in medicine of colours […] the art of painting is similar to the art of music, in order to hear it you have to see it. Similarly you have to hear the painting. I paint quickly, with energy, because every brushstroke is visible and crucial. And what is important for me is for my paintings to have their own life. I paint as if I was painting in an escape, in an escape of life”.