A Painting Finds Its Memory

When I painted Come Dance with Me, I believed I was making a painting about romantic love.

Two figures meet only through their hands, suspended in a gesture that could be the beginning of a dance or a farewell. I wanted the moment to remain unresolved. Are they moving towards one another, or slowly letting go?

One of the things I find most fascinating about painting is that an image often arrives before its meaning. While I work, I rarely think in words. I respond to colour, atmosphere, gestures, and feelings.

Sometimes it takes years before I recognise the experiences it came to contain.

Come Dance with Me is one of those paintings.

 

Image 1: Come Dance with Me (2021). Oil on canvas, 60 × 60 cm.

Image 2: One of the many weathered frescoes I found beneath Bologna's porticoes. Their faded coppers, worn surfaces, and muted greens stayed with me long after I returned home.

 

In the autumn of 2019, my family travelled to Bologna for my sister's graduation. It was one of the few occasions when almost everyone was together.

Bologna felt unlike anywhere I had been before. The first thing I noticed was its colour. The city seemed to glow in warm shades of terracotta, ochre, and deep brick red. Even on overcast days, the walls held their own warmth. As a painter, I found myself drawn to those earthy colours almost instinctively.

The endless porticoes changed the rhythm of walking. Even when it began to rain, we simply carried on beneath their shelter.

There was something wonderfully human about the city. We bought pizza by the slice, followed the smell of roasted chestnuts through the streets, and paused whenever music drifted across Piazza Maggiore. Students in dark suits and fresh laurel wreaths filled the squares, celebrating with their families long into the evening.

I smiled when we discovered one of Bologna's whispering walls. Standing at opposite corners, we could hear one another perfectly despite speaking in whispers.

Some of my favourite moments were the quieter ones. Stepping inside a church after the noise of the streets felt like entering another world. Outside there were conversations, bicycles crossing the stone pavements, and footsteps echoing beneath the porticoes. Inside there was only cool air, silence, and soft light resting on old paintings.

 

Congratulating my sister after her graduation in Bologna.

 

My sister wearing the traditional Italian laurel wreath after her graduation. We celebrated together as a family, unaware that this would become one of the memories I would return to most often.

 

I had never seen the Italian tradition of the laurel wreath before. When it was placed on my sister's head after the ceremony, I thought how naturally it belonged there. There has always been something quietly dignified about her. She has never sought attention, yet in that moment, she seemed entirely at ease with everything she had achieved.

Watching her, I felt enormously proud. She had chosen a demanding path, first studying at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków and later completing her Master's degree in Italian literature in Bologna. Behind that celebration were years of discipline, perseverance, and genuine love for what she was studying.

Before the ceremony, she had been calmly reading through her thesis one last time, yet she was still making sure everyone else felt welcome. Afterwards, the concentration gave way to relief. We spent the evening together around a table, talking, laughing, and celebrating without any sense that it would one day become a memory.

 

A toast to new beginnings.

 

When I think of my dad during those days, I remember how relaxed he seemed.

He had worked hard all his life and rarely took holidays, so seeing him wandering through the city without hurrying anywhere felt unusual. He was curious about everything: the churches, the architecture, the food, the rhythm of the streets. Before arriving in Bologna, my sister had taken our parents to Rome and the Vatican, and he spoke with genuine enthusiasm about everything they had seen together.

Although he didn't speak Italian, he kept saying how kind and open everyone had been. He seemed genuinely touched that people could understand one another so easily, even without sharing the same language.

I did not know these would become some of my last ordinary days with him.

 

Bologna is full of fragments like this—frescoes softened by centuries of weather and time. I found myself drawn not only to their stories, but to the beauty of their fading surfaces. Detail of 

 

Among all those memories, it is the weathered frescoes beneath the porticoes and in the churches that have stayed with me most vividly. Many had almost disappeared. Their surfaces were cracked and worn, their colours softened by centuries of rain, sunlight, and passing seasons. Yet I often found them more moving than perfectly preserved paintings.

I realised I was looking not only at the images themselves but at everything time had done to them. The losses had become part of their beauty.

Months later, while painting Come Dance with Me, I instinctively reached for the same colours I had admired in Bologna: copper, warm terracotta, and the blue-green of aged patina.

 

Copper has always intrigued me because it never remains the same. Exposed to air and rain, it slowly develops a green patina. Some materials seem to welcome the passing of time rather than resist it.

 

 

Detail of a weathered fresco in Bologna.

 

The painting originally had a different title. While I was working on it, I often listened to Leonard Cohen's Dance Me to the End of Love, so I simply called it Dance with Me.

Years later, someone wrote to ask whether Come Dance with Me was still available. That single word—come—had never occurred to me before. Yet the moment I read it, I realised it expressed what I had been trying to paint all along.

The painting was never really about dancing. It was about trust.

One figure has already stepped into the movement. The other chooses to follow. The real subject is the willingness to move together without knowing exactly where the path will lead.

That is why Come Dance with Me feels like the right title. It is more than an invitation to dance. It is an invitation to trust, to accompany another person, and to enter into something shared. It allows the painting to hold not only romantic love, but also the bonds between siblings, parents and children, and the friendships that shape our lives.

 

One evening in Bologna, our family gathered around the same table to celebrate my sister's graduation.

 

Today, when I look at the painting, I no longer see only a meeting of two people.

I see my sister beginning a new chapter of her life.

I see my parents walking slowly beneath Bologna's porticoes, fascinated by a city they had never imagined they would visit.

I hear Leonard Cohen's voice and think about the kind of love that remains beside us through time, change, and uncertainty.

I remember the worn frescoes whose beauty had been shaped by time.

None of these memories were part of a conscious plan. They were simply part of who I was while I was painting, and somehow they found their way into the work.

 

Writing about my paintings has taught me something I hadn't expected. What begins as an attempt to explain a work to others often becomes a way of understanding it myself.

 The paintings seem to know more than I do while I am making them. Only with time, distance, and reflection do I begin to recognise what they have been carrying all along.

 

Children have a wonderful way of slowing time. While we looked up at architecture and paintings, they became absorbed in a tiny discovery on the pavement.