Before I Called Myself an Artist

 I once painted a fool.

Or rather, a court jester — a figure whose wisdom hides behind the mask of laughter.

It is no coincidence that I am writing this on the first of April, a day devoted to playful tricks and small deceptions.

The story began many years ago in Lublin, in a beautiful but very cold tenement house on Narutowicza Street, with high ceilings and worn wooden floors.

 

Narutowicza — the view from our window.
Courtesy of Aleksandra Pawlik

 

Narutowicza — staircase.
Courtesy of Marcin Grzebielucha

 

From the busy street, you passed through a gateway into a quiet courtyard. Outside, the city moved quickly — people hurrying past, cars rumbling loudly. But the moment you stepped through the gate, the pace seemed to slow. The walls were weathered, the plaster cracked in places, and the staircases seemed to remember countless footsteps. 

I shared this apartment with other young people. It was a typical student flat, with people from different parts of Poland studying a wide range of subjects — a small world of contrasting personalities and ways of living. Yet we bonded over late-night conversations, cooking together from time to time, and the occasional party. A whole book could be written about each of these colourful people. Each of us was beginning to step into adulthood, searching for our own path and for the passion that might shape our lives.

 

Earlier years — me with a friend.
Courtesy of Piotr Salata

 

Our room on Narutowicza.
Courtesy of Aleksandra Pawlik

 

At that time, I did not have an artist statement or any carefully written descriptions of the work. I did not even have an easel — only a few brushes, some oil paints, and a strong belief in carpe diem.

It never bothered me when people called me an amateur. I had always liked the word. An amateur is someone who loves — someone who follows fascination and devotion long before titles or definitions appear. In those years, that description felt very close to the truth. I was simply someone who loved painting and kept returning to it whenever life allowed.

Commissions came by word of mouth, and I rarely stopped to ask whether something might be difficult or whether I was sufficiently qualified to do it. I simply began.

It was in that flat that I received an unexpected commission — to paint a copy of Stańczyk.

 

Jan Matejko, Stańczyk.
Photograph by Marcin Grzebielucha

 

Working on a copy of Stańczyk.
Courtesy of Marcin Grzebielucha

 

At first, copying a painting may seem like little more than a technical exercise. Yet the longer one lives with a work like this, the more something else begins to happen. You start to look not only at the image, but also through it — slowly entering the thinking of the artist who created it.

In Matejko’s painting, the court jester sits alone, slumped in a chair, while a celebration continues in another room. The light falls on his red costume and on his face — sad and thoughtful. I remember looking at it for long stretches of time while working and feeling a growing admiration for Matejko’s extraordinary skill as a painter.

The depth of feeling contained in that single face was astounding. The jester appears full of emotion, yet strangely emptied at the same time — as if he already knows that something important has been lost. That painting taught me something I only understood much later: that a face can hold an entire story.

I was also fascinated by the knowledge that the young Jan Matejko lent the jester his own face. There is something revealing in that gesture. Even at a young age, he seemed to carry a deep awareness of history and of his country’s fate. He painted with a sense of purpose and conviction that must have already been very clear to him.

I admired that certainty because I felt almost the opposite. I had no clear sense of where painting might lead me, or even whether I had the right to think of myself seriously as an artist. And yet, somewhere in the back of my mind, a quiet thought had begun to appear: what might happen if I applied to the Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków — the very academy that bears his name.

Not long afterwards, I did.

Looking back now, that moment feels like a quiet threshold. In that cold room on Narutowicza Street, something opened — a willingness to take painting more seriously.

The path from copying paintings to finding one’s own voice was long. Over time, through practice and despite many doubts, I slowly began to recognise my own instincts.

At times, painting had to step aside to make room for other parts of life — work, motherhood, the ordinary responsibilities of everyday life. Yet it never disappeared. It always returned.

It remained a quiet thread running through the different stages of my life.

From time to time, friends who once lived in that house send me photographs of the courtyard or the old gateway. These small gestures always move me. In those images, I recognise the place where so many small moments of life unfolded — doubts, laughter, long evenings that once felt ordinary and yet quietly shaped who we were becoming.

Narutowicza — now.
Courtesy of Piotr Salata

 

Narutowicza — entrance gate now.
Courtesy of Marcin Grzebielucha

 

There is a Polish song whose refrain speaks about returning to places we have been before. I often think about it when I see those photographs — about the strange tenderness of revisiting places where something of ourselves was once left behind.

I suspect everyone has a place like this — a room, a street, a courtyard — where something quietly began.

Perhaps that is why today, as I open another kind of studio — an online atelier — these words feel unexpectedly close to those evenings in Lublin. Beginning this journal feels a little like stepping once again through the old gate on Narutowicza Street — with curiosity, uncertainty, and quiet hope. Beginning anything new always requires a small measure of foolishness.

If you are here, maybe something already connects us.

 

— Paulina