Winter, paint, and bread.
I forgot how early the light disappears here during the cold months. By four in the afternoon the sun is already gone, and it still surprises my body, even though I lived in this climate for half of my life. It’s my second winter back in Poland after many years away, and once again I’m reminded how much the seasons dictate the pace of the day. The rhythm of work changes, turning into slower tempo. Ideas planted earlier in the year are growing inward. I let them, I don’t rush it.
Last week I met a childhood friend. I didn’t want to go out. Frost had taken full command of the streets, and painting in my studio was almost finished, calling me back to the easel. I had been waiting a long time. I had accidentally put it into “chemical sleep” during an earlier stage, an overuse of clove oil vapors that paused it far longer than I intended. Resistance was there, as it always is, regardless of weather or social events. Creative work pulls strongly, demands full presence, narrows the outside world. But I went anyway. And as often happens, I was glad I did.
We sat in a small, cozy cafe and talked about ordinary things. We revisited childhood memories that we both cherish and hold dear. She spoke about her little daughter and how the life rearranged itself when she became a mother and wife. I spoke about my work, painting, and how both I and my practice are changing in this new chapter of my life.
Looking at us, our paths seem so different. Hers grounded in building a family home, mine shaped by long hours alone in the studio. Yet as we talked, there was no sense of distance between us.
What stayed with me wasn’t the conversation itself, but the moment within it. I notice her eyes glowing when she spoke about things she loves: baking bread, experimenting with different flavours in homemade sourdough as well as growing lavender and making different products from it. She told me she buys flour straight from the farmer’s mill, ancient grains that you won’t find in mass produced loaves.
I smiled because it felt so familiar. It reminded me of countless conversations I’ve had with fellow artists, circling endlessly over pigments, brushes, surfaces and painting techniques, completely absorbed and obsessive.
In that moment, I realised that even if the medium changes, the spark is the same. Whether painting, baking, sewing or cultivating herbs, the same curiosity, patience, attention to detail and quiet devotion to process runs through us. Seeing it reflected in someone else, even on a path different from my own, made my heart expand. It reminded me of the invisible threads that connect creative lives, regardless of form. In winter, when days are short and work turns inward, those threads feel especially precious, like warmth carried from one pair of hands to another.
Back in the studio later that evening, I felt those threads again. The nearly finished painting was waiting exactly where I had left it, patient. I approached it with a slightly different attention, more spacious, less isolated. I thought about flour milled by hand, about lavender grown slowly, about devotion expressed through repetition.
This is what my painting practice feels like to me lately, not a solitary act, but part of a wider landscape of making. A conversation carried across mediums. In winter, when work turns inward and the light fades early, I trust this quiet continuity. I return to the easel knowing I am not only painting images, but participating in a shared human impulse to build and shape with our hands, and to care deeply about how we do it.
Painting is now finally complete patiently waiting once again in a drying corner for the varnish layer and hi-res photo session. The pause, the chemical sleep in clove oil vapors, the waiting, they all became part of its story.
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