Its colors are based on contrasts of complementary colors (violet, blue, yellow, orange). The setting was supposed to be desolate, apocalyptic, so I chose some of my favorite motifs: desert and indestructible mountains.

As you can clearly see in my portrait, the seriousness of this image means that I didn't dare to smile while posing. Painting him exhausted me mentally. I knew that after it I would start a new series, with lighter symbolism and vivid colors. This is how the history of the Egyptian Cycle began.

The artworks in  the Doomed to Extinction diptych, when juxtaposed together, refer to the fact that both indigenous human cultures and fauna and flora have been condemned to death. However, to see this, we must go back to colonial times, when the capitalist economy, exploiting both people and nature, spread like a virus beyond Europe. now we are reaping the poisonous fruits of this economic boom.

On the left you can see me working on Native American, and on the right is an acrylic palette with the paints I was using at the time.

This painting evokes strong associations at first glance, doesn't it? This is Climatic Vanitas (80 x 50 cm, oil on canvas). In the first half of 2020, I decided to start painting with oil paints. I knew they would work great in my textural painting. I already had a few dusty tubes given to me by my sister. And to be honest... my impasto has since reached a previously unknown level.

In the artwork, I wanted to juxtapose objects from a classic still life like Vanitas, associated with the passing of time and the remains of our civilization. A rainbow balloon in the form of a unicorn breaks this seriousness. It so happened that shortly after the beginning of the picture, the Covid19 pandemic broke out. Vanitas now strongly reminds me of this plague.

Here I am with Blue Macaw while working on it. This photo started my habit of taking portrait photos with paintings.

The first drawing sketch, made before taking up painting, was the one for the diptych Doomed to Extinction. The first part was the one with the Blue Macaw (40 x 60 cm; oil on canvas, 2019), a beautiful, functionally extinct parrot. What does that mean? Well...it is dead in the wild, but lives in captivity. Its blue contrasts with the burning background, and it itself begins to fall apart into glowing pieces. My formal experiments and the creation of something unreal are clearly visible here... However, I did it based on reality - at that time, Amazonia, the Macaw's habitat, was already plagued by regular fires. Some of them were initiated by cattle breeders who wanted to cleverly expand their areas at the expense of the forest. While making this painting, something important also happened in my life: I became a vegetarian.

Here is the second part of the Diptych, with a Native American (40 x 60 cm; oil on canvas; 2019/20). I portrayed a random man, I was attracted by his tragic but powerful look. He represents North America, on the other hand  Blue Macaw South America. Emerging from a cloud of smoke. In fact, it is not known whether it is tobacco smoke used in indigenous rituals or smoke from a fire.

Here I am posing with Desertification... a few years after it was taken, with a wonderful frame already fitted to it. My grandparents eventually bought it. My grandfather used to work in coal mines as a road engineer and this image reminds him a bit of those times.

Desertification in carbon dioxide fumes (60 x 40 cm; acrylic on canvas; 2018) is my first painting from the Climate Cycle. I have combined the motifs of a desert, a withered tree, a city covered in smog and a power plant. The fennec fox lying in the lower part was supposed to be just sleeping, but practically everyone thinks that it is dead... In the painting I referred to the desertification of Poland, which has become more and more noticeable recently. We have very low groundwater resources, comparable to Egypt (considered a desert country!), and we waste them on digging fossil fuels from the ground and conventional energy. The colors of this painting are subdued, but based on complementary colors, i.e. blue and purple combined with orange and yellow.

The idea of ​​the cycle

I started painting the works from the Cycle in 2018 because I wanted to put on canvas what I was deeply concerned about and what had an existential dimension. I started making more difficult compositions, combining several photos. I started to get into magical realism seriously, because in order to combine so many motifs, I had to create slightly different worlds. I haven't made proper sketches on paper yet to plan the layout of the painting in advance, so sometimes the end result was a surprise to me ;)

In the beginning there was activism.

After 2017, I started getting involved in the climate movement that was developing in Poland at that time. I read a lot of books about climate and nature, one of the most important was the one by Naomi Klein No is not enough. I was becoming more and more convinced that the most important thing we are currently facing is the climate crisis. And this attitude towards the Earth will be, in the near future, if it is not already, a key political dividing line, much more adequate than the anachronistic being on the left or right. Perhaps this year (i.e., 2023), UN Secretary General António Guterres mentioned that the ERA OF GLOBAL WARMING has actually ended and we have entered the ERA OF GLOBAL BOILING.

Previously, I had more energy for political action, now I'm a bit burnt out, but I treat it as a transitional stage to gather strength. Together with my sister, I participated in Climate Camps (in 2018 and 2019). In 2019, we took part in the first civil disobedience campaign in Poland in defense of the climate near the mine in Tomisławice. The police quickly caught us and we spent several hours in the "arrest". It was very exciting and, in fact, I am much more attracted to such actions than working in institutions - although this is also very necessary. However, I think that I fulfill myself best in helping the planet as an artist - art has a huge power of influence and overcomes the rational resistances rooted in every person, reaching straight to what is true in us, to the heart.